Though the first version of the tool was quick to develop, Massé said that it ended up as quite a challenge to make it work in the context of building a whole house. It would allow players to be more creative with flexible tools like that." I thought to myself that this would work really well for placing walls and building houses. "You can easily create straight or curved roads of any length without being restricted to a grid. "I got really inspired by Cities: Skylines and its road tool," he explained. This is an exciting development for veteran players of the Sims, where split-levels are only achievable by giving a house half a foundation, while curved walls are the stuff of dreams, so I asked Massé about them specifically. One watershed moment for me was the video showing how you can easily make split-level floors and curved walls in Paralives. Rather than, for example, buying a single bed or a double bed, you can just place a bed and resize it yourself.
Screenshots and short videos, usually shared on Twitter, show simple but engaging things like the day and night cycle in the game, being able to resize objects at will, and a very fine level of control over everything in your mini-home. Paralives certainly has what we could call the Ooblets effect. Massé describes the marketing first approach of Patreon, where you build a community from the start of development, as "really motivating". One of the original artists, Roxane Morin, has now left, but the goal is to hit a team size of 10. And while Paralives was initially a solo dev project, Massé has been able to hire a small but dedicated team: 3D artist Léa Sorribès, communications director Christine Gariépy, and new programmer Anna Thibert, now collectively known as Paralives Studio. So they were able to know there was interest for the game really quickly and use it to build a community during development." He liked the idea of involving a community, so Patreon appealed more than working with a publisher. "As soon as they had their first screenshot of the game, they posted it on social media. "I was really inspired by what the Ooblets team did, which is the marketing first approach," Massé explained. It currently stands at nearly $36k per month, which is more than respectable for an indie game with no projected release date. He's always liked to work on his own projects, and consequently says he can "do a bit of everything." He continued: "I learned game design and 3D modelling by myself while working on side projects and game jams." Once he felt he had enough experience, he quit his job to make Paralives, launching the Patreon last year.
Massé worked in the mobile games industry after graduating in 2014 (though he told me over email that he had been learning about programming and development since high school). So I reached out to Alex Massé, who we might term the lead developer, to ask him some Para-centric questions. After bunch of Sim YouTubers like lilsimsie did reaction videos and hyped it up, Paralives ended up with a lot of eyes on it, and I, in turn, hungered to know more. A few weeks back, though, there was a flurry of new interest when a new character creation video was released. Simthusiasts like myself have been quietly aware of Paralives for a small while now, mostly because of the very cool nature of the in-progress video clips that surface on a fairly regular basis. a life simulator? A Sims-like? (I know The Sims can't be the only game of its type, but it's dominated the market for so long that the only other one I can think of is that weird adult one where the entire point was having sex.) It, by which I really mean the teeny tiny dev team, is being funded on Patreon. If you're a fan of The Sims 4, or you know someone who is, or even if you just follow people who occasionally retweet simsposting into your timeline, you've probably seen something about Paralives by now.
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