Paralives

''Paralives'' is an upcoming indie life simulation game for Windows and macOS developed by Paralives Studio. The game is heavily inspired by '' The Sims franchise from Maxis and EA, with the game'' incorporating house building and management in a small open world town. It is scheduled for release in early access in 2025.

As of March 2024, Paralives Studio employs a team of 12 people.

Gameplay

''Paralives'' will take place in an open world environment with employment opportunities alongside events such as festivals. Players can build houses, create characters and control their lives in a desired way.

The character creator, titled as "Paramaker", allows the customization of the appearance and personality of "Parafolk", the name of the in-game characters. Players are able to customize the physique and height of the Parafolk. The root and shade of hair, clothing and accessories can be toggled as intended using color swatches, color wheels and texture selection.

A similar system is in place for objects and structures, allowing the player to adjust the size, placement, color and texture of walls, floors, windows doors, and furniture.

The simulation aspect of the game features "together cards" that appear to players after a "together bar" is filled up during a character's conversation.

Development

''Paralives'' was created by independent game developer Alex Massé. After working on several projects such as PewDiePie's ''Tuber Simulator'' and a number of demos for Project Tiny, Massé made a decision to quit his job and develop ''Paralives'' regularly. Development of the game started in January 2019 and the development was officially announced in June 2019.

Initially, ''Paralives'' was a solo project, but Massé hired people to work on the game: Léa Sorribès, Christine Gariépy, and Anna Thibert, forming Paralives Studio. As of May 2021, the team consists of ten people in total after hiring a music composer. Massé thought that previous life simulation games did not have a tool that allowed easy and precise creation of any house in-game, which prompted him to design ''Paralives'' to offer a sense of endless customization. He was inspired by the road tool found in '' Cities: Skylines'', and tried to make it work in ''Paralives'', thinking it would fit well for placing walls and building houses. The developers incorporated the technique of procedural animation, which involves automatic reactions based on previously created animations, to avoid the need of animating every situation possible and save some developing time.

Considering the game is being funded through crowdfunding platform Patreon, the backers are invited to propose suggestions regarding what type of content they would like to see in the full release. Massé was influenced by ''Ooblets''s success on the service, and decided to join it as well, having admired the support it had just from the concept art and idea alone. He hoped the Patreon page would aid the development enough to hire another artist. As of November 2023, it contains close to 15,000 supporters and earns over $35,000 per month. According to Massé, there is a document with 100 pages called the "Parabook", containing all the ideas collected so far. Massé's plan is to release the game in Early Access on Steam, then support the game with free updates and modding, where people would share their designs on the Steam Workshop.

Awards and nominations

* 2020 Canadian Game Devs - Most Anticipated Canadian Game Winner

References

External links

* {{official website, https://www.paralives.com/

Upcoming video games
Indie games
Social simulation video games
Life simulation games
Windows games
MacOS games
Single-player video games
Video games with gender-selectable protagonists
Video games developed in Canada