𝐃𝐄𝐈 𝐒𝐢𝐦 𝐃𝐞𝐩𝐨™

Firstly, Paralives is AMAZING for an early access game with a 15 man dev team 🥰 I haven't had tons of time to play just yet, and I know there is TONS of room for improvement (that will happen in due time), so these are just my initial thoughts on the Para-Maker specifically.

I wanted to touch on something that I find sorta important.

Dark skin paras...😬

Now, I'm not saying anything about liking or disliking the artstyle because I think custom content will be able to fulfill people's needs and styles eventually. However, their vanilla options for dark skin are...not good.

Above is my attempt at making my sim Nyanaath. It took me waaay too long to make her look decent, even with the customization options for the skin highlights and such. It's always the first thing I notice; dark skins suffer from the same thing they suffer from in other games (both in the early Sims games and other character creator games). And that's a lack of detail. As an artist I can tell you it's because you cannot take a light/pale skin and simply darken it waaay down with a colorwheel without losing Every. Single. Detail.

Dark skin reflects light differently than lighter/fair skin, so when you darken it without considering that, it looks flat and undefined.

This was honestly something I noticed was lacking from the beginning when people were discussing the Para's stylized looks.

Dark skin Paras should not look like Mr. Popo from DBZ next to light or fair skinned Paras. This is something easily (relatively) fixable by making a separate category for brown and dark skins that have the proper detailing built in by default—or even just making some body detailing you can add to get rid of that flatness without having to pile on tons of makeup to brighten highpoints on the skin.

I also have my gripes with the fact that I can't get certain facial features without a preset. But again, more face and body sliders are something easily added. But I write all of this to say;