#sim development

[furufuro]

Runil's tattoos.

༺═───────────────═༻ I'm still working on his genetics. Just thought I'd have a bonus post for ya'll since I missed a post last Saturday.

[sourmiiiilk]

❤️Online Obsession - New Yandere Game

❤️Chat with your online friend and meet him in real life in my upcoming yandere visual novel game.

❤️ The demo is coming out this February 14th on Steam and Itch!

❤️I am the only developer, so reblogs are greatly appreciated!

[episims]

Poster Collages on Butterfly Crawler

Never enough of poster collages for me, so I put together some ready-to-use ones and slapped them on the Free Time Butterfly Crawler mesh.

There are 28 variations. These collages use the work of 228 different artists; the archive includes full-sized swatches with artist names and a file with a link to each of them.

Full credit to the artists. None of the art is by me, and I don't make any profit from sharing these. Please see the links to check out other pieces by these people, I'm a big fan of their work!

Download (SFS) (alternate)

The files are compressed, Free Time is required. You can find add-ons for the butterfly crawler here and there.

I've tried to ensure no AI images are included. Please support human artists 💜

[dualityvn]

New main menu screen!

[qvert]

(smth about fighting to protect what she cares for - in the way she always wanted but was never supposed to)

There was a whole bunch of deep thoughts about this one but it’s late and I just want it off my pile so I don’t keep adding more contrast to the gold bits

I’ll elaborate tomorrow - speculation in the meantime is encouraged :*

[ophernelia]

@ERNESTGARB: mind you she asked ME to go to the beach wtf

.ೃ࿔*:･ recent episode | watch from the start!

[tumblebagel]

So... I appear to have blacked out last night, and woke up with this open on my computer

Is... Is this something anyone would actually play?

@ayviedoesthings is the creator of the temporary background I'm using, though if this does end up getting fully developed, the cave would be a visit-able location

Edit: wait it’s @nyxisart who did the background! My bad!

[f1-obsessed333]

[just-ornstein]

[JK]  My first job was as an Assistant Producer for a video game company called Interplay in Irvine, CA. I had recently graduated from Boston University's School of Fine Arts with an MFA in Directing (I started out as a theatre nerd), but also had some limited coding experience and a passion for computers. It didn't look like I'd be able to make a living directing plays, so I decided to combine entertainment and technology (before it was cool!) and pitched myself to Brian Fargo, Interplay's CEO. He gave me my first break. I packed up and moved out west, and I've been producing games ever since.

[JK] I loved my time at EA. I was there for almost a full decade, and learned a tremendous amount about game-making, and met the most talented and driven people, who I remain in touch with today. EA gave me many opportunities, and never stopped betting on me. I worked on The Sims for nearly 5 years, and then afterwards, I worked on console action games as part of the Visceral studio. I was the Creative Director for the 2007 game "The Simpsons", and was the Executive Producer and Creative Director for the 2009 game "Dante's Inferno".

[JK] I haven't played in a long while, but I do recall that after the game shipped, my wife and I played the retail version for some time -- we created ourselves, and experimented with having a baby ahead of the actual birth of our son (in 2007). Even though I'd been part of the development team, and understood deeply how the simulation worked, I was still continually surprised at how "real" our Sims felt, and how accurate their responses were to having a baby in the house. It really felt like "us"!

Now for some of the development and lore related questions:

[JK] So I ended up in the incredibly fortunate position of creating the shipping neighborhoods for The Sims 2, and recruiting a few teammates to help me as we went along. 

Around the same time, we started using the Buy/Build tools to make houses we could save, and also bring them into each new build of the game (correcting for any bugs and incompatibilities). With the import tool, we could load Sims into these houses. In time, this "vanguard QA" process turned into a creative endeavor to define the "saved state" of the neighborhoods we would actually end up shipping with the game.

On playtesting & the leftover sims data on various lots:

Basically, we were in the late stages of development, and the Save Game functionality wasn't quite working. In order to test the game properly, you really needed to have a lot of assets, and a lot of Sims with histories (as if you'd been playing them for weeks) to test out everything the game had to offer. So I started defining a set of characters in a spreadsheet, with all their tuning variables, and worked with engineering to create an importer, so that with each new build, I could essentially "load" a kind of massive saved game, and quickly start playing and testing. 

It was fairly organic, and as the game's functionality improved, so did our starter houses and families. 

The thought process behind the creation of the iconic three neighborhoods:

I would not say it was particularly planned out ahead of time. We knew we needed a few saved houses to ship with the game; Sims 1, after all, had the Goth house, and Bob Newbie's house. But there wasn't necessarily a clear direction for what the neighborhood would be for Sims 2. We needed the game to be far enough along, so that the neighborhood could be a proper showcase for all the features in the game. With each new feature that turned alpha, I had a new tool in my toolbox, and I could expand the houses and families I was working on. Once we had the multi-neighborhood functionality, I decided we would not just have 1 starter neighborhood, but 3. With the Aging feature, Memories, a few wacky objects, plus a huge catalog of architectural and decorative content, I felt we had enough material for 3 truly distinct neighborhoods. And we added a couple of people to what became the "Neighborhood Team" around that time.

Later, when we created Strangetown, and eventually Veronaville, I believe we went back and changed Pleasantville to Pleasantview... because I liked the alliteration of "Verona-Ville", and there was no sense in having two "villes". (To this day, by the way, I still don't know whether to capitalize the "V" -- this was hotly debated at the time!)

Pleasantview:

Anyway, to answer your question, we of course started with Pleasantview. As I recall, we were not quite committed to multiple neighborhoods at first, and I think it was called Pleasantville initially, which was kind of a nod to Simsville... but without calling it Simsville, which was a little too on the nose. (There had also been an ill-fated game in development at Maxis at the time, called SimsVille, which was cancelled.) It's been suggested that Pleasantville referred to the movie, but I don't think I ever saw that movie, and we just felt that Pleasantville kind of captured the feeling of the game, and the relaxing, simple, idyllic world of the Sims.

Pleasantview started as a place to capture the aging feature, which was all new to The Sims 2. We knew we had toddlers, teens, and elders to play with, so we started making families that reflected the various stages of family life: the single mom with 3 young kids, the parents with two teens, the old rich guy with two young gold-diggers, etc. We also had a much greater variety of ethnicity to play with than Sims 1, and we had all new variables like sexual orientation and memories. All these things made for rich fodder for a great diversity of families. Then, once we had family trees, and tombstones that carried the actual data for the dead Sims, the doors really blew open. We started asking ourselves, "What if Bella and Mortimer Goth could be characters in Sims 2, but aged 25 years? And what if Cassandra is grown up? And what if Bella is actually missing, and that could be a fun mystery hanging over the whole game?" And then finally the "Big Life Moments" went into the game -- like weddings and birthdays -- and we could sort of tee these up in the Save Game, so that they would happen within the first few minutes of playing the families. This served both as a tutorial for the features, but also a great story-telling device.

Anyway, it all just flowed from there, as we started creating connections between families, relationships, histories, family trees, and stories that we could weave into the game, using only the simulation features that were available to us. It was a really fun and creative time, and we wrote all of the lore of Sims 2 within a couple of months, and then just brought it to life in the game.

Strangetown:

Strangetown was kind of a no-brainer. We needed an alternate neighborhood for all the paranormal stuff the Sims was known for: alien abduction, male pregnancy, science experiments, ghosts, etc. We had the desert terrain, which created a nice contrast to the lush Pleasantville, and gave it an obvious Area 51 vibe.

The fact that Veronaville is the oldest file probably reflects the fact that it was finished first, not that it was started first. That's my guess anyway. It was the simplest neighborhood, in many ways, and didn't have as much complexity in terms of features like staged big life moments, getting the abduction timing right, the alien DNA thing (which I think was somewhat buggy up until the end), etc.  So it's possible that we simply had Veronaville "in the can", while we put the last polish on Pleasantville (which was the first and most important neighborhood, in terms of making a good impression) and Strangeville (which was tricky technically).

Veronaville:

But my personal favorite was Veronaville. We had this cool Tudor style collection in the Build mode catalog, and I wanted to ship some houses that showed off those assets. We also had the teen thing going on in the aging game, plus a lot of romance features, as well as enemies. I have always been a Shakespeare buff since graduate school, so putting all that together, I got the idea that our third neighborhood should be a modern-day telling of the Romeo and Juliet story. It was Montys and Capps (instead of Montagues and Capulets), and it just kind of wrote itself. We had fun creating the past family trees, where everyone had died young because they kept killing each other off in the ongoing vendetta.

[JK] You know, I have never seen The Lone Gunmen, and I don't remember making any kind of direct references with the Strangetown Sims, other than the general Area 51 theme, as you point out. Charles London helped out a lot with naming Sims, and I'm pretty sure we owe "Vidcund" and "Lazlo" to him ... though many team members pitched in creatively. He may have had something in mind, but for me, I largely went off of very generic and stereotypical ideas when crafting these neighborhoods. I kind of wanted them to be almost "groaners" ... they were meant to be tropes in every sense of the word. And then we snuck in some easter eggs. But largely, we were trying to create a completely original lore.

[JK] Well, I think we kind of pushed it with The Sims 2, to be honest, and I remember getting a little blow-back about Bunny Broke, for example. Bunny Broke was the original name for Brandi Broke. Not everyone found that funny, as I recall, and I can understand that. It must have been changed before we shipped.

We also almost shipped the first outwardly gay Sims in those neighborhoods, which was bold for EA back in 2004. My recollection was that we had set up the Dreamers to be gay (Dirk and Darren), but I'm looking back now and see that's not the case. So I'm either remembering incorrectly (probably) or something changed during development.

In general we just did things that we found funny and clever, and we just pulled from all the tropes of American life.

[JK] The alien abduction started in Sims 1, with a telescope object that was introduced in the "Livin' Large" expansion pack. That's when some of the wackier ideas got introduced into the Sims lore. That pack shipped just before I joined Maxis in 2001; when I got there, the team had shipped "House Party" and was underway on "Hot Date". So I couldn't tell you how the original idea came about, but The Sims had this 50's Americana vibe from the beginning, and UFOs kind of played right into that. So the alien abduction telescope was a no-brainer to bring back in Sims 2. The male pregnancy was a new twist on the Sims 1 telescope thing. It must have been that the new version (Sims 2) gave us the tech and flexibility to have male Sims become pregnant, so while this was turned "off" for the core game, we decided to take advantage of this and make a storyline out of it. I think this really grew out of the fact that we had aliens, and alien DNA, and so it was not complicated to pre-bake a baby that would come out as an alien when born. The idea of a bunch of guys living together, and then one gets abducted, impregnated, and then gives birth to an alien baby ... I mean, I think we just all thought that was hilarious, in a sit-com kind of way. Not sure there was much more to it than that. Everything usually came from the designers discovering ways to tweak and play with the tech, to get to funny outcomes.

[JK] Possibly we were just testing the functionality of the Wants/Fears and Memories systems throughout development, and some stuff got left over.

[JK] I can't remember, but that sounds like something we would have done! I'm pretty sure we laid the groundwork for more stories that we ended up delivering :) But The Sims 2 was a great foundation for a lot of continued lore that followed.

--

I once again want to thank Jonathan Knight for granting me this opportunity and taking the time from his busy schedule to answer my questions.

[the-vampire-shed]

guys guys guys. hear me out. a DATING SIM for the fab four. I wanna do something productive with my life, and bedrotting does NOT look good on me. since i'm already in school for digital media/coding/game design, I thought that it would be a fun idea to put my knowledge to the test and have some fun while i'm at it! there's a few problems.

I want Mr. Way's blessing and permission to make this game.

I would have to assemble an elite team of passionate freelancers to help with assets and such.

this would be a long-term project. I'm autistic, and burnout is a VERY real problem for me. this means i may need some other people to take the reins when i can't function.

I have no idea if people would even be interested in this.

there would be a discord server for people interested in helping make the game/watch the progress.

this game would be FREE TO PLAY. this means I will not be getting any monetary gain from this. If any money is donated to this project, it will be used to buy drawing tablets and subscriptions to art/game creating programs.

there's probably a lot more that could be added, but I just needed to get these thoughts out before I lose them.

Do NOT spam Mr. Way's social media pages to bring this to their attention. I would be very grateful if you could mention/share this post wherever you can.

Thank you for reading!

PLEASE REBLOG!

[furufuro]

Seya's tattoos.

༺═───────────────═༻ Just wanted to give you guys some posts to let you know we're alive, and still working on Uranesia. I hope to be more interactive and do more stuff on Tumblr in the future, but I'm still busy with the project and with school. In the meantime, I'll do the best I can with these small updates. Stay safe in this crazy weather everyone 💚.

[sourmiiiilk]

❤️Online Obsession - Customisation

❤️Customise your character in my upcoming yandere visual novel!

❤️You can customise your pronouns, personality, skin colour, hair colour, length and texture!

Your personality defines your eye type and colour

Your appearance is reflected in CGIs and game graphics

Your appearance also affects how your character is described

Your personality affects your character's behaviour and some interactions, as well as certain dynamics with Adisorn

❤️ The demo is coming out this February 14th on Steam and Itch!

❤️I am the only developer, so reblogs are greatly appreciated!

[ghosty-named-lythronax]

Jmart chibis.

[willowcreektownie]

Updates with Social Bunny's niece

beginning | prev | next

[sea-grunks-dating-sim]

Sailing with Stans: Chapter 1 Release Date!

It's official! We're releasing Chapter 1 on Sunday, March 16, 2025.

Stay tuned for updates throughout the week. We'll share the specific release time soon!

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟 𓆞

What will Chapter 1 be about?

Chapter 1 is the revised version of the demo based on all of your incredible feedback! But that's not all: many choices are completely new or have been rewritten. We also have updated sprites, new sprite emotions, new backgrounds, and new GUI.

What about the full game?

Due to the team's busy schedules, we need more time to work on the game outside of school and work. Instead of releasing the full game all at once, we've decided to release the game chapter by chapter.

We've been hard at work creating content for the game, and we're so excited to share it with you!

If you have any questions, please let us know! 💙

[larkingame]

hello friends! the first version of larkins demo is up and ready to play!

features:

create your character

chase vampires through the city of saint laurent

interrogate guild hunters after you

meet wyatt and a vampire character that really bites <3

a note: this is the last version of the game that has me as the sole person working on it (as is a good chunk of this has been edited by the lovely @gwaha) i really hope you enjoy :)