A town on a hill

I’ve wanted to make this game for a long time. The Sims 2 was the one that got its hooks in me. The people in it remembered things, held grudges and were afraid of specific, silly things, and the whole neighbourhood seemed to be gossiping when you weren’t looking. Then The Sims 3 let you walk out the front door and down the street, and I’ve wanted both in the same game ever since. Nobody seemed to be making that, so on the last day of July I opened Unity and started.

This is the first Game Log. From now on there will be one every two weeks, each about one part of the game, with honest pictures of wherever it’s at.

Where it stands

After two months, SimGoodie is a real game I can play on my Mac. Residents have needs, moods, wants and fears, and they pick what to do next on their own. They have careers and skills, and they remember what happened to them. There’s a build and buy mode that works on any lot, a clock with seasons and weather, and a cream, scrapbook-style HUD, because the paper-and-tape look is still the one I love most.

I install a fresh build almost every morning and play it before deciding what to fix next. We’re past thirty of those builds now.

The evening everyone starved

The most useful thing that happened this month was a failure. I sat down to play my own save, and nobody in the house could eat. The game told my resident to “Cook a meal first.” while she stood beside six cooked meals.

The kitchen in my test house had been built by hand, and behind the scenes the game was looking for that particular stove and that particular counter. The moment I bought a new counter, the whole food chain quietly stopped working.

That evening turned into a rule every system follows: it has to work for any house a player can build, not just the one I built. The same bug also got me to build what I now think of as the most important part of the project, a simulation lab. It runs a household for whole in-game weeks with no graphics at all, so I can see whether a family actually makes it to Friday before I ever open the game.

Linden Rise

The pictures in this post are from Linden Rise, the first district of Goodhaven, the coastal town the game is set in. It’s a crescent of houses climbing a hill above the harbour, with a hairpin bend at the top and a bench called the Overlook where you can sit and look out over the bay.

Every district starts as a concept picture, then gets a to-scale blueprint: which lots go where, how steep the street is, which houses get a view of the water. Only then does it get built. The first version of Linden Rise came out flat and looked nothing like the concept, so I tore it down and started again from the blueprint. The version you see here is the second one.

What’s next

The big goal is one open town: Goodhaven as a single place with no loading screens, where you can follow your resident from the front door down to the bay and meet whoever lives there. Linden Rise is the first piece of that. Next I want the harbour at the bottom of the hill, and a reason to walk down to it.

If there’s something from the old games you’d want back more than anything, I’d love to hear it. That list is basically my to-do list.

See you in two weeks.

— Alexander