Designing Paralives' Town + Showcase of a BuildingAlex Massé
31 jan 2025
Hi, it’s Alex!
When Paralives releases in Early Access later this year, your household will move into a carefully crafted town that we’re currently designing. Today, I’m excited to guide you through our creative process for the town's design and Léa will show you the first building we’ve made for it.
Our Goals with the Design of the TownAs we work more and more on the town, we’ll be able to share sneak peeks with you as it takes shape. To start off, I wanted to dive into some of our goals with the design of our town.
Explorable open-world town: We really want to encourage the player to get out of their house and visit the city. To do that, we plan on having activities to do around town, places where you can meet people, shops, restaurants, workplaces and more. As a reminder, the town will be open world and there won’t be any loading screens when visiting different lots.
Human-sized city: The density of the town shouldn’t be too low to make sure your Paras can visit various lots in a given day without wasting too much time traveling. For instance, it shouldn’t take more than 30-60 minutes for a Para to walk to work or to a shop otherwise they will lose a big part of their day walking around. Cars will be added later on after the release but we still feel like a walkable city will be fun to explore as there will be many places to visit within a short distance.
A pretty town with a history: We want it to be somewhere you would love to visit as a tourist in real life. It should be filled with interesting locations, landmarks, and beautiful architecture and you should be able to feel that the city has an interesting past as well.
Have various lot types: We know that some players would like to play in a townhouse while others prefer bigger suburban houses. Some players like to build houses from the ground up while others prefer to establish their household in a premade house. As such, we will have various sizes of lots and a good range of prebuilt houses available for you in the town. The Layout and Identity of the TownThe town will be split into small districts, the two main ones being:
Old town: A densely populated, European-inspired area with townhouses made of stone and a small castle that was built when the city was first established many centuries ago.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/121188950
Some of the reference pictures we’ve collected to illustrate what we aim for with the Old Town district.
Industrial: During its history, the town went through an industrial era where factories and houses made of bricks were built. However, since then, some buildings have been abandoned while others were renovated into modern lofts.