larksims

[larksims]

there Is something tempting for me in the idea of redoing the veronaville concept from the ground up. like making a neighborhood based on shakespeare according to what I personally think would be funny

finally, it's time for every antonio from every play to be the same unfortunate guy whose boyfriends keep leaving him to marry rich women

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absolutely don't have it in me to do an early/prequel uberhood but if I did. i'd make the old country be veronaville and the goths would have a great aunt tamora

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Maxis Match Retexture - 3t2 Chorus Girl Curl

I took the base game wavy hair texture and stretched/squished it until it fit the Marcel wave look of this hair.

PF-EF, binned and familied (gray linked to black), Trapping's mesh (fixed by rented-space) included. Polycount is around 4.5k, according to the hair database.

Swatches under the cut.

Download here.

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Maxis Match edit of Peggy 2835

My first attempt at editing a hair!

Retextured using Maxis textures and overpainting, colors matched as closely to Maxis as I could get. Edited the alpha to remove some of the wispy bits.

The texture on the back is a little crunchy but I wasn't sure the best way to make it better at this point. See a comparison with the original hair here.

PF-EF, binned and familied (gray linked to black), mesh included. Polycount is around 6.5k, according to the hair database.

Swatches under the cut.

Download here.

[larksims]

if san francisco had the kinds of public domain historical references that nyc does (1940s tax photos and 1943 market report my beloveds) maybe I would consider this. oldsf.org has some good stuff (and honestly the photos it Does have make me realize how accurate the original sims timeline of suburbanization is for the bay area) but I am not yet a good enough builder to come up with entire blocks of a city without an excessive amount of reference pictures

tormenting myself because I planned an entire simcity subhood based on 1940s brooklyn but now I'm like what if I based simcity on early 20th century san francisco instead as a nod to maxis hq being in the bay area...

[larksims]

tormenting myself because I planned an entire simcity subhood based on 1940s brooklyn but now I'm like what if I based simcity on early 20th century san francisco instead as a nod to maxis hq being in the bay area...

[larksims]

i can't decide what i'm calling this thing!

my very first attempt at doing a ts2 prequel in ts2 was totally different (i had been playing a lot of ts1 and had gotten jeff to the top of his career and made diane a superstar and i was like. well the pleasants in ts2 would be way different if all this happened, wouldn't they? cue me making neighborhood 1/old town in ts2)

and then halfway through that, i was like. wait a second. what if i got really unhinged about this. and i scrapped it and started a "beginning of pleasantview" challenge neighborhood. except i was like, well i also need to create ancestors for ts1 characters and the landgraabs and all this other stuff. so obviously this got into big spreadsheet planning time, which my first attempt hadn't.

and i was happily and diligently playing my "beginning of pleasantview" neighborhood for a while, although i should mention that zero gameplay actually took place in the pleasantview terrain main hood, lol, because i was switching between an old town subhood, a simcity (belladonna cove) subhood, and an old country subhood. i got pretty far into it (bella and mortimer's generation was born) but the neighborhood had gotten a little corrupted and the way it was primarily manifesting was in sims not properly recognizing their parents and siblings on their family trees. which I knew was going to bother me too much because having functional family trees was like, one of the main points of the neighborhood.

(i think the issue started when i moved inhabited houses into the bin or whatever when i decided i was going to have belladonna cove be my simcity rather than downtown, but having the 5 sim lane child ghosts spawning npcs on the lot because I didn't realize I needed a mod to prevent that... probably didn't help. the witch doctor was basically a permanent guest at 5 sim lane and the specter family living there just put out food for him and worried about him when he passed out on the porch every day. good times.)

so I decided to start over and make improvements based on what I had learned with my first attempt. and during this time, I had the thought, why not go all out if I'm going to start over? why not build an early/mid-century simcity myself? why not actually commit to the bit and map decades onto the timeline I already had? why not play out a proper historical game?

but trying to nail down an "exact" timeline when unmodified sims lifespans are pretty short (it's rare for sims to live long enough to see their grandchildren age up into teens) and when ts1 didn't have any time progression. ts1 feels like it takes place over a fairly long window of possible times, all at once. so, to me, it doesn't really feel in the spirit of the game to say it's any one specific decade at any point. it's always, to me, a larger range than one decade. after all, these are not humans and this isn't earth! they're sims! things are a little wonky!

so I'm doing "eras" of time. every in-game year (a full seasonal rotation) = one era. this mostly matters for fashion reasons, lol, so I sorted the eras based on similarities and trends across sequential decades of fashion. thus, era 1 has the 1910s at its core, but it also includes the 1900s and 1920s, up until the 1920s silhouette really becomes its own thing.

this way, the sims that care more about fashion can keep up with the trends within an era and change their style more frequently, but overall, the neighborhood will still have a cohesive sense of time on a broad scale.

anyway idk what to call it. I mean I'm basically playing out 20th century suburbanization, having sims move from simcity to old town/neighborhood 1/pleasantview over time until it's a thriving community... "beginning of old town" is a funny name because it's like. hello. that's new.

[larksims]

i can't decide what i'm calling this thing!

my very first attempt at doing a ts2 prequel in ts2 was totally different (i had been playing a lot of ts1 and had gotten jeff to the top of his career and made diane a superstar and i was like. well the pleasants in ts2 would be way different if all this happened, wouldn't they? cue me making neighborhood 1/old town in ts2)

and then halfway through that, i was like. wait a second. what if i got really unhinged about this. and i scrapped it and started a "beginning of pleasantview" challenge neighborhood. except i was like, well i also need to create ancestors for ts1 characters and the landgraabs and all this other stuff. so obviously this got into big spreadsheet planning time, which my first attempt hadn't.

and i was happily and diligently playing my "beginning of pleasantview" neighborhood for a while, although i should mention that zero gameplay actually took place in the pleasantview terrain main hood, lol, because i was switching between an old town subhood, a simcity (belladonna cove) subhood, and an old country subhood. i got pretty far into it (bella and mortimer's generation was born) but the neighborhood had gotten a little corrupted and the way it was primarily manifesting was in sims not properly recognizing their parents and siblings on their family trees. which I knew was going to bother me too much because having functional family trees was like, one of the main points of the neighborhood.

(i think the issue started when i moved inhabited houses into the bin or whatever when i decided i was going to have belladonna cove be my simcity rather than downtown, but having the 5 sim lane child ghosts spawning npcs on the lot because I didn't realize I needed a mod to prevent that... probably didn't help. the witch doctor was basically a permanent guest at 5 sim lane and the specter family living there just put out food for him and worried about him when he passed out on the porch every day. good times.)

so I decided to start over and make improvements based on what I had learned with my first attempt. and during this time, I had the thought, why not go all out if I'm going to start over? why not build an early/mid-century simcity myself? why not actually commit to the bit and map decades onto the timeline I already had? why not play out a proper historical game?

but trying to nail down an "exact" timeline when unmodified sims lifespans are pretty short (it's rare for sims to live long enough to see their grandchildren age up into teens) and when ts1 didn't have any time progression. ts1 feels like it takes place over a fairly long window of possible times, all at once. so, to me, it doesn't really feel in the spirit of the game to say it's any one specific decade at any point. it's always, to me, a larger range than one decade. after all, these are not humans and this isn't earth! they're sims! things are a little wonky!

so I'm doing "eras" of time. every in-game year (a full seasonal rotation) = one era. this mostly matters for fashion reasons, lol, so I sorted the eras based on similarities and trends across sequential decades of fashion. thus, era 1 has the 1910s at its core, but it also includes the 1900s and 1920s, up until the 1920s silhouette really becomes its own thing.

this way, the sims that care more about fashion can keep up with the trends within an era and change their style more frequently, but overall, the neighborhood will still have a cohesive sense of time on a broad scale.

anyway idk what to call it. I mean I'm basically playing out 20th century suburbanization, having sims move from simcity to old town/neighborhood 1/pleasantview over time until it's a thriving community... "beginning of old town" is a funny name because it's like. hello. that's new.

[larksims]

got all my era 1 ladies ready to go!

(left to right, top to bottom: elizabeth darling, julia kat, ma hick, marie charming, amelia landgraab, enriqueta bachelor, prudence crumplebottom, gretle goth, eudora "grandma" specter)

[larksims]

for the most part, my neighborhood is built around the idea of using the inconsistencies between ts1 and ts2 as fuel for interesting headcanon

ts3 is as "canon" to me as the console games are. and, like the console games, i have included a few characters here and there in my neighborhood, like enriqueta & milton to flesh out the bachelor family tree and erik darling because i already needed a family that would have all of its daughters marry into other families and darling is a funny name for a family like that

so the darling family includes erik, obviously, and his sisters gabrielle and marion, who marry into the charmings and landgraabs, respectively. gabrielle is named after one of debussy's girlfriends (because between claire and luna, the charming family seems like it's doing something with clair de lune) which then makes erik feel like a music joke, too, because erik satie. and so then their father's name becomes alfred as a reference to satie, and their mother's name becomes elizabeth... for a different reason...

because marion marries malcolm landgraab ii and they have malcolm iii, obviously. but they also have twins after that: dudley and a girl they name amelia elizabeth after both of her grandmothers. but amelia elizabeth is a very long name for a little girl, so she goes by mimi.

flash forward to when amelia elizabeth gets out of college and discards her cool rebellious grunge cosplay in the way that so many rich kids do when their priorities change. she gets married to a fellow trust fund baby, chip snooty patooty, starts going by buffy, and acts like her grunge phase never happened

it's a very fun little easter egg for me even though i literally never played the console games or downloaded the snooty patooty family lol. genuinely I just think chip and buffy have extremely funny bios and I wanted them in my neighborhood

as for how dudley landgraab is still a "rich kid hoodlum" in ts2 after all those years... what can i say. the rich are leeches and I'm making that loser a vampire

[larksims]

rubbing my hands together like a fly because I figured out a satisfying explanation for brandi's age (in relation to ts1) AND michael bachelor being older than bella in ts2 despite seeming younger in ts1...

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i love playing the sims

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just made my first defaults.....!!!!!! :D

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[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.

[larksims]

My first attempt at retexturing a hair... with the original (Peggy 2835) for comparison.

Not sure why I decided to tackle a hair with so many curls for my first try, but it was a fun learning experience!

I used a combination of Maxis hair textures and overpainting to get it as Maxis Match as possible. Edited the alpha a little to reduce the wispy sections and some of the scragglier bits.

If I liked this hair more, I'd try to learn how to modify meshes to replace that flower clip with a bow or something. But for now, I'm ready to move on to some other meshes and see what else is possible!

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looking through the hair database and trying to figure out which aesthetic is going to be the least time consuming for my upcoming second (third?) attempt at an unhinged "premade ancestors in simcity (and beyond)" game. I want to do a really crunchy, low poly maxis match aesthetic, but if I'm going to end up using extensive default replacements anyway to keep the townies era-appropriate (and switching the default replacements out each era, meaning my playable sims will all be using custom hair anyway to keep their post-mortem portraits correct), then there's nothing stopping me from picking literally any aesthetic under the sun!!!