alexmasse
patreon
Behind the Scenes: A tool to Create Cutscenes in Paralives 🎥
🕑 Added 2025-06-13 13:19:02 +0000 UTCHi, it’s Alex!
Today, I wanted to show you a tool I made for the game that allows the creation of cutscenes. It’s very useful for us developers to showcase the game, and we used it to make the release date announcement trailer. I named this tool Storyboards. Our goal would be to make it available to players, too, once we have finished developing it, which could be after the initial release.
🔐 This post is for Patrons only so please don’t share it, thank you!
➡️ Storyboards: How It Works
Here’s an overview of how Storyboards can be used:
Here, I have created a 4.5 seconds long cutscene that shows off the flower shop in the Old Town plaza. It consists of two different camera angles.
By right-clicking an element, I can set the position of the camera to what I am currently looking at.
When I press play, you can see the results. Sorry for the low-quality GIF! Also, have you noticed the barbershop’s spinning thingie? I love it, hehe!
Then, I can add other effects to my Storyboard, such as changing the time of day, adding text and various image filters.
Here’s what the above Storyboard setup does. It’s a lot of fun to create these little movies!
Another cool thing Storyboards can do is to animate build mode items to showcase houses.
You can define if you want the items to appear from older to newer items or from the left to the right of the screen.
Storyboards can also be used to animate characters and make them interact. In live mode, with the character autonomy and everything, it’s not always easy to make Paras do exactly as you wish, so Storyboards come in handy to create cutscenes and get full control!
In the release date announcement trailer, Storyboards greatly helped us with complicated scenes like this timelapse showing the life of a Parafolk.
Behind the scenes, we simply had multiple characters and moved them into the shot at specific timestamps. Bonus: you might notice here that there was originally a Halloween party shot in the time lapse, but we had to cut some scenes because the trailer was a bit too long, unfortunately!
What a more complex Storyboard like this one can look like!
➡️ Going Further with Storyboards
Storyboards have been really useful for us so far to create videos to show off the game. In the future, we hope to do more with them, and our goal is for players to eventually be able to use them too, once we have improved and polished the tool but it won’t be available for the initial release in December.
Some potential use cases for Storyboards:
Town cutscenes: For instance, when you first start a new save file, there could be a cutscene made by us, the devs, showing off the town.
Important life moments: When getting married or when saying farewell to an elder Parafolk, there could be short cutscenes to make the moment stand out.
Machinima: Youtubers could create stories with their Parafolks through cutscenes and share them online.
Showing off builds: Players could create cutscenes with animated cameras to show off houses that they have built.
And so on!
I hope you liked today’s post, and please feel free to share your thoughts below!
Cheers,
Alex
Comments
Moon_Raes
OMG!! This will be AWESOME when this feature comes out!!! <3
Jasmin Soleillune
You bring back Cutscenes? Like in the Sims 2? I'm crying you guys! Even if it takes time to implement, I'll be happily waiting. <3 <3
Emily
OOooohhhh my gosh!! You are incredible! I can't freaking wait to see where this leads and all the creative content people are going to make with this!!! So! Much! Fun!!! Ah!
Kayleigh
I LOOOVE this! So excited you plan to make this available for players! Being able to showcase builds, create machinima type stories or even just twirl our dollies around a little bit - how FUN!
Ghislain Pedro
PARALIVES MACHINIMAS🗣️ PARALIVES MACHINIMAS🗣️ PARALIVES MACHINIMAS🗣️
Umm_Litshi
😯
Amy Joscelyn
WOW and here I thought Paralives would give us three types of play mechanics: character creation, building, and live mode. I didn't realize we were going to get to make movies eventually in this game too! A very favorite game of mine growing up was The Movies, and I feel like this Storyboard feature would be able to scratch that itch of more easily making scenes and little films with characters and sets we personally create. I was already excited for this game, and now I'm even more hyped.
Eleanor Swan
Is it possible to put music into those cutscenes?
Common Chameleon
This is maybe the feature I’m most excited for out of everything we’ve seen so far!
Nathalie Carluccio
WOW 😲😲😲
Sonia Martinez
Justice for the Halloween Party!
CheesecakeLasagna
Ooh, this might just single-handedly make me fall in love with editing again!
I kinda forGoT
Omg this us soooo cool
Eleanor Swan
OMG! I LOOOVE IT!!!!!!! I would spend HOURS on it!
Josephin01
There are voices on YouTube who think that work on the game will stop after Early Access, and you just don't want to say so now. Many people don't want to buy the game for this reason. Therefore, it might be reassuring for many people to learn more about it.
Josephin01
Could you please provide more information about your funding plans after Early Access? I, and many others, are quite concerned about funding the game. How do you plan to make more money? At some point, everyone interested in the game will own it, and then you'll no longer generate any revenue. What would happen then? Do you plan to work with a major publisher? I hope not, because then the entire appeal of this game would be lost. Please provide more information about how you plan to always make enough money to continue working on the game.
bohnita roy choudhury
Ooooh !
GirlTransDiva
Pour créer une vidéo sans frustration j'aurai besoin d'avoir accès à toutes la liste des animations du jeux classé par émotions. Pouvoir aussi choisir l'heure et arrêté le temps. Que les para reste bien assis sur leur chaises. Pouvoir mettre une animation sur 20 para en même temps avec un seule clic.
