Weekly review #11

Hey folks! This week, Jimmy has been working on vehicles, while Nico has continued his progress on the world editor. We've also reached out to several modders to discuss their expectations!

Vehicles and locomotion

Jimmy has been thinking about integrating skateboards, and especially how to allow players to easily perform various tricks. One of the challenges is to adapt the game's built-in objects, particularly through mods, to make the skateboard work with them. We will likely offer a specific tool to indicate the edges on which the skateboard can slide, and some surfaces suitable for tricks. Another important point related to modding is the creation of other vehicles adapted from the ones we provide, by modifying their appearance and some physical parameters (for example, adding a hoverboard with a different appearance and parameters from the base skateboard).

We haven't introduced it on our homepage yet, but VirtualSociety will offer four game modes: life simulation, adventure, roleplay, and serious-game. Obviously, the gameplay for vehicles will be quite different from one mode to another, and this whole part mainly concerns the adventure mode (although characters can use, with different gameplay, vehicles in other modes).

 World Editor

Nico has added various visual indicators when editing walls to show the size of the walls, some distances between placed objects, or angles between the currently edited wall and other walls. We've also improved the smart snapping to easily create regular architectures without restricting placements to a grid.

We've also worked on the wall textures, to get closer to the style we want for VirtualSociety.

As usual, you'll get a new glimpse of our world editor on Twitter each week!

Discussions with Modders

Modding and user-generated content are fundamental in VirtualSociety. On one hand, we want to encourage modding and make it as easy as possible to integrate user content. On the other hand, we believe that many of you will want to customize the game, expand its possibilities, and include everything you want. To do this, we want to make modding tools directly integrated into the game, easy to use, well-documented, and capable of easily extending each aspect of the game.

To properly guide our tools and make sure we're heading in the right direction, we've started contacting various modders from other games to get their opinions on different points. We've already gathered different opinions and started synthesizing all the responses. We'll be publishing several articles on this topic in the coming weeks to show you the results of this study, as well as the decisions we've made based on it! In any case, we were thrilled to discuss all this with passionate modders who have truly inspired us so far!

If you're a modder and would like to share your opinion, please don't hesitate to contact us!

Thank you for your support, and see you next week!