As you know, changing the height of the characters is central to Paralives, and we’ve been trying to make this happen since the very beginning of the development. Having this possibility of different heights adds a lot of uniqueness to characters and makes the world feel more diverse and alive. Our goal for the genetics part of height is not only to get this idea of height being inherited, but also to add some variation to it so that children of the same parents don’t necessarily have the same height. We want the player to say things like “This family has giant genes running in it!” or “This child grew to be taller than both their parents!”. Waiting for kids to grow before knowing which one is going to be the tallest of the family is a nice little detail that this system makes possible!
How it works:
We split heights into three categories: short, medium, and tall, with different ranges depending on the Para’s sex (resembling real-life statistics). When generating a child’s height, we randomly pick one parent’s category and apply it to the child. Then we randomize the exact value within that range. That means your Para might be “tall like his mom”, even if they’re not exactly the same height.
The big brother is already taller than everyone!
Note: In the Paramaker, you can make a genetic child from two same-sex parents, but during gameplay, the parental couple will always consist of one para that can get pregnant and one para that can get others pregnant (you can edit these per character in the Paramaker).