Paralives

Paralives is an upcoming life simulation indie game by Paralives Studio for Windows and macOS. The game, heavily inspired by The Sims, features house building and management in a small town. It is scheduled for release in early access in 2025.

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 is being developed by indie game designer Alex Massé. After working on several projects such as PewDiePie's Tuber Simulator and a number of demos for Project Tiny, Massé quit his job and began developing Paralives regularly. Development of the game started in January 2019 and was officially announced in June 2019.

Paralives was initially a solo project by Massé, but as of May 2024, the team has expanded to twelve people, collectively forming Paralives Studio. Massé wants Paralives to offer a sense of endless customization with "powerful and intuitive tools that allow players to easily create any house with precision". He was inspired by the road tool in Cities: Skylines and developed a similar tool in Paralives for building houses. The developers incorporated the technique of procedural animation, which involves automatic reactions based on previously created animations to save developing time.

The game is being funded through the crowdfunding platform Patreon and backers are invited to propose suggestions regarding content they would like to see in the full release. Massé chose to use Patreon after seeing Ooblets's success on the service. As of November 2023, the Paralives Patreon page contains close to 15,000 supporters and earns over $35,000 per month. Massé plans to release the game in Early Access on Steam and support the game with free updates and modding, where people can share their designs on the Steam Workshop.