alexmasse
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Addressing Paramaker Feedback
🕑 Added 2022-01-21 15:39:25 +0000 UTCHi, Anna here!
Today, I wanted to explain a bit more what we have been doing since we released our video and came back to work this month, how we organize the work between us to properly wrap up this Paramaker period and show you some community and team feedback we are going to address.
Team organization and planning (For Patrons only! Please don’t share)
Last week, Alex told you about the next exciting steps we are going to take regarding live mode development, but while planning and designing this new era, we (the programmers) still need to make some adjustments and fixes to the Paramaker. Even if we are very eager to start working on the live mode, doing so will help us feel more comfortable getting back to it when we will need to polish it and add more features in the future. Some of us will still start to work right away on those live mode first steps, but only part-time for now.
However, our 3D artists will still actively contribute to the Paramaker’s greatness for a while! Now that they have all the basic features working, they will continue to improve the characters, their customization options and slowly start to create all clothing items and hairstyles that we will need before releasing the game. Chloé will also continue to develop the art direction of the environment. That’s one advantage of having worked on the build mode and the Paramaker before live mode: now our 3D artists can work by themselves and test their ideas directly in the game without waiting for programmers to code their needed features.
A few days back, we organized a little playtesting session among ourselves to catch more bugs and to see which features needed more tweaks. After having worked so much on the Paramaker and having our nose buried into it every day, it’s nice to take a step back and try to enjoy it as players! It also helps a lot with finding what’s wrong, in context. We tried to make Paras from references, we tried to click every little button on the UI and listened carefully to every little sound. We came up with a lot of feedback!
Addressing feedback (For Patrons only! Please don’t share)
Of course, thanks to the video and the community (so, thanks to you!), we also have a lot of useful exterior feedback to help us. Here is some of it:
- Feedback on the art style itself and how characters fit in with the environment. These types of feedback cannot all be addressed as our art style is ultimately our choice and we’re aware that it may not be to everyone's preferences. In next week’s Patreon post, Chloé is going to explain the choices we made, why we made them and she will show you some references that inspired us.
- The lower part of the legs and feet skin texture is darker than the rest of the body and the toenails look very light. That’s one thing we noticed too and the textures and their color information is going to be tweaked.
- The chest is a bit low on the torso. The whole chest area is being reworked as it also causes issues with some of the clothes and some of the body shapes.
- You really loved Marvin! We are very proud of him and really delighted that you all seemed to like him so much.
Here is a few of our own remarks after our playtesting sessions within the team:
- Sliders range. Some body and face adjustment sliders didn’t have enough range to make extreme shapes and some of them were on the contrary too extreme! We will need to go over them one by one and make sure the extreme sides of every slider are not breaking the skin or the clothes textures.
- Fat and muscle sliders. The rendered texture is not perfect for all body shapes yet and the mix of fat and muscle values do not produce the expected result. It definitely needs a bit more work!
- UI categories improvement. To me, this is one of the hardest things to test out! I feel like everyone’s brain is wired differently and we don’t search for a piece of clothing or a slider in the same way, so the categories and how they are separated in the UI may make sense for some people and do not for others, especially with so many things in the catalog! We will tweak some of the categories after the playtesting sessions and think about a search and filter option to make things easy for everyone.
- “Unequip all” button. It gets quite annoying when you test many clothing items and accessories at the same time and you need to start over from a clean slate. At the moment, you have to find them again in the different categories and unequip them all separately.
- ..and more! We’ve added a lot more to-dos on our list and will fix the highest priority ones. Other ideas regarding potential improvements will have to wait after we work on the live mode for a while!
Last, but not least, here are some of the bugs we caught:
From top to bottom, left to right: 1. This is why you should never let your kid cut your hair 2. It’s quite subtle but the right eye is a little bit tucked in for no reason! 3. We like our socks mismatched, but the reversed toe colors weren’t planned… 4. Looks like some slider drag handles want to escape! 5. The muscle sliders have had a hard time coping with some of our clothes 6. After we switch from a masculine to a feminine body preset, both underwear are equipped and there’s no way to unequip them.
That’s all for today! Hope you appreciated this little inside look at our last steps to wrap up the Paramaker-focused development period.
Have a great weekend,
Anna
Comments
Kt S
Hi all! thank you for always updating us! Will pregnant Paras be in the paramaker for changing outfits? (Not asking if we can make a brand new family and make a para pregnant in the Paramaker) Asking in case this might cause issues in Paramaker- From a Sims player on occasions Sim bellies wouldn't show pregnant or it shows abs on their very obvious pregnant bellies
Rémy DI-FANT
Hi Anna, Hi Alex, Hi the team! Darn, I'm 3 days late for this update. I can imagine how the paramaker might be actually the most complicate aspect of your game to deal with (animation, calculation, complex parameters). Good luck with it. I didn't talked about it so far, but I'm very impressed you even included a "Height slider" as it was something missing from that other game which was really annoying (all characters of the same age at the same height? Meh...), but very probably because it means that much more problem to deal with, like making sure characters of various height and size don't clip, collide or glitch into other objects or characters during animations or interactions. Do you have any testing process for these? Well, I guess you do, lol. Interesting bugs! But, if I may, the 2sd bug doesn't look to me as much as a bug. Afterall, strabismus is a real thing, haha.
nemo
The underwear bug made me laugh :)
Minakie
I don't necessarily dislike the new Paras, but they feel like they have a different art style than Maggie did on her Christmas special, and I do like that style more for some reason (just don't ask me to explain why 'cause I don't know, haha), so I think it would be really interesting to see an article with an overview of the different art styles you guys have tried so far, which you ended up deciding to use and the reason WHY. After all, this king of behind-the-scenes regarding game development decisions is the reason so many of us are Patrons. We want to have a better understanding of your thought process. :)
Jo Landers
You can't please everyone! I'm glad you're sticking to the art style y'all chose
Luna
Just because you don't personally like the style, doesn't mean it is a bad choice to keep going. They're doing their research and polling us for feedback. Honestly I like it fine, lots of people I know like this simplified style that is super common in indie games. Specially since they're doing their own thing and not copying off another franchise. And there will always be custom content to download as much as you please. Not to mention, Telltale's games, Jet Set Radio and Borderlands all have this cell shaded with details in black look and are all beloved games, specially the last two. Borderlands in specific gets complimented quite often on its art style direction. You just happen to not like it which is fine.
Felice Enellen
You say "our art style is ultimately our choice and we’re aware that it may not be to everyone's preferences", but that doesn't carry a lot of weight with those of us who don't care for it. I have to say the big-nosed dreamworks character motif totally turns me off of the game. It's a shame, but I just can't immerse myself when the characters look like that. Great tools and great furniture can't make up for it. It's your choice, yeah, but lots of people in this world insist on making unwise choices and end up failing. Sticking to your guns on this may not be a good idea. You need to do some serious focus testing with different styles to be sure you aren't turning off the majority of your audience before it's too late to redo everything. If nothing else, you should take a hint from how the custom content in The Sims works. It's either maxis-match, which is a sliiightly cartoony look but basically conforms to normal human proportions, or a hyper-realistic look. You DON'T see ANYONE making custom content that looks like the paras you guys are making. People aren't looking for that. Making a single-player narrative-based game is one thing, you can do all kinds of stuff because there's a willing suspension of disbelief, but when the player is creating their own content, they're going to want to make what they know, i.e. realistic-looking human beings. People want to self-insert (and create mary-sue versions of their self-inserts), they want to make their own family, they want to make people they have crushes on or people they want to play matchmaker with, they want to make their boss and put him in a swimming pool with no ladders. They don't want a dreamworks movie.
Maxx
Great work! I’m wondering - will Paralives enter Alpha stage after the Live mode focused period? 🤔
hjs_wells
Thank you for this update! Glad to see that bugs and areas of improvement are being caught early!
SeventhEmberXander
Concerning the tattoos function, do you think it'd be possible to implement an in-game decal creation feature to slap onto as many things as you want? Something along the lines of the Rockstar Social Club Emblem Editor, where you mix and match various shapes and elements to create it? It doesn't even have to be limited to tattoos, maybe you could put your decals on your clothing items, or cushions?
Adina
Looks amazing! I am absolutely in LOVE with the artstyle. Absolutely can't wait to make myself and others in the paramaker! 😍 I have a question (and sorry if it's been asked before!), will we ba able to have mascara/longer/shorter eyelashes? Much love to the team
Fran Smith
For clothing layering, would it be possible to perhaps have a listing of all the items currently chosen on the side of the screen? Each item could have a visible/invisible toggle to temporarily render them invisible without unequipping (just to see if the shirt works with the pants without the jacket), and a delete button (to unchoose completely). And perhaps there could also be a kind of "deleted" drop-down box of some description for tried-on-and-discarded clothes - click to reinstate, so that the player could play around with taking things on and off without having to re-find them again. This kind of set-up would really help players mix and match: "What did those jeans look like with that shirt again?" "And now let's compare how it looked with that other shirt...?" "No, let's go with the first one." "Oh, where were those shoes I tried on way before - they would be perfect with these new pants!" I'm imaging having masses of CC and trying to mix and match stuff. And then retrying something that you discarded before. Something like this would help. Perhaps you already have something similar in mind. Just thought I'd mention in case you don't. :-)
Adrian Silagan
I can’t wait to see an Asian para thrown in the mix! I’m interested in how they would represent them without being disrespectful
Alfie
the bugs always make me giggle.
Alex Massé
Thank you for the nice words and feedback! It's true that the resolution of the tattoos and other textures is not extremely high. The reason is that there will be a lot of characters on the screen so the game would not run as good on an average computer if the quality of the textures were too high. This is something that we are still working on and might improve though. There could be a setting for higher quality textures for instance.
Alex Massé
I like the idea!
Alex Massé
Thank you Dixie! Ah yes, that could be nice! We will be looking into searching and filtering by tag. Modders will already be able to add new tags using our modding tools but maybe we could add an easier way for players to create new tags directly in the Paramaker
Alex Massé
Could be nice for sure, thank you for the suggestion! It would support more customization options and you could for example move the bangs a bit or scale them. Within the team, we have studied some games who are doing that and found them pretty cool. It's still unsure if we will be able to support this level of customization though because it's a technical challenge and we might end up prioritizing other features
Alex Massé
Yes, could be nice! They have that in many games like Animal Crossing for instance and it's useful to easily retrieve your most used items
Alex Massé
Yes! We will be looking into that for sure
Nate
I love love love the art style. I especially love the art direction in the build mode. Can't wait for this game!
Y’all are doing incredible as usual! I think the paras look great- I think ultimately for me at least - I worry about the character models looking low in resolution in comparison to the smoothness of everything else. The art style is lovely of course but I think some people are worried that Edges won’t be smoothed & it’ll look a bit rough which I’m not sure if that’s the artstyle or not! (Example: the tattoos look lower in resolution and a little blurry - hoping we can get some clear tattoos on there!) Of course everything is not final & still a WIP to a degree. I think the artstyle is unique & beautiful still, but I too would like to know if the paras will have more clarity & higher resolution looking models (nothing crazy! Just cleaner looking to a degree) As always I’m excited to see more! <3
Emma Engler
With all the super advanced stuff they had been talking about, I would be shocked if that couldn't be done, especially with everyone on steam making mods.
Samara Stanleigh
It would be really cool to choose different colouring styles for hair! Be able to pick highlights, lowlights, give them a balayage, choose an ombre effect, etc. and also pick the colour combos! Would add more personality to the paras and be really fun to play with/explore!
SeventhEmberXander
I dunno, they've got all the time in the world to build this game. They said that while the Paramaker video made it look finished, there's still a fair whack they need to work on. Maybe layered clothing is one of them. I mean, i could've sworn they said that was one of the features they were looking at in the Clothing brainstorming session results a few months back.
Dixie
Thanks for addressing some feedback! It's cool to know that you guys really are listening to people's concerns and want to make the game great! Excited to see what's next :) Something that might be cool is a tagging system for the clothing and if people could add their own tags to specific things on top of a filter system, like if they think an outfit would work better for outdoor wear they could add that tag to it or something.
Han
I would love so much a brush tool to color hair, and color strands of hair, with different types of brushes and brush sizes and opacities...
Pedro Lima
Remember The Sims 2 for consoles? It had honestly the coolest features in terms of customizing outfits of all The Sims games ever. It had the option to pick an undershirt, a top and a jacket individually and the player could combine the layers freely. Also each article of clothing had their own set of customizing options (not sliders, but two or three options of presets for each category), like open or closed jackets, sleeves length, baseball cap facing forward or backwards, sweater with hood, collar or neither etc. I believe that was the only The Sims game with these features. I understand that at this stage, layered clothing would be nearly impossible to implement in the Paramaker, but the set of options for each piece I would love if you could consider it. I always thought that was a genius way of expanding the catalog (which was very limited in 2004) while in reality seamlessly reusing assets they already had. Anyway, I'm just thinking out loud. I missed the Paramaker brainstorm so I'm basically babbling tbh.
Beth Anne
This is awesome, thanks. :) One request I would make is on hair meshes -- I would love to see bangs as an addon rather than built into hair styles. I've seen far too many "with bangs & without bangs" full hair meshes and it's a lot of disk space for such a small detail.
Sdanwolf
Awesome Blog Anna! One thing that I think would help with respect to clothes is maybe do like Planet Zoo and have a “favorites” tab That way if I find a pair of jeans or a shirt I really like, I can favorite it and find it quick when I need to put it on. Keep up the great work!
Sarah Hull
love this idea!!!
Zahlea
You didn't mention in the UI categories improvement, but do you have any plans of allowing players to add or remove tags themselves? It could help players get the sorting that makes sense to them. Loved the post!! It's always so interesting when you're able to share more about your process and how the team works ❤️❤️❤️
Tee W
Came here to say that. I love it
Jennifer Huber
Hey! You can never have too much booty protection, am I right? LOL Thank you so much for staying in touch with us regarding questions and concerns. It is wonderful to feel like you are actually being heard.
sagebye
will there be an option in the modding menu how we can change like ui colour, opacity and the font? that would be cool!
Greg Savage
I'm thoroughly entertained by the unequippable double undies.
Sophie Goodman-Merel
Tags for styles of clothing and color are great for organization and finding specifically what you're looking for!
