The Sims™ 3 Community Blog
: May 2012
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Team-Wide Content Creation on The Sims 3 (Part I)



One of the quandaries we had on The Sims 3 was a goal of making a deeper and more interesting game than The Sims 2, with more content to explore, but within the scale of our studio.

I ran up against this wall when designing the painting skill. The Sims 2 had 12 paintings your Sim could paint on the easel:

     

I was emotionally attached to the easel because I’d programmed it in The Sims 2. It was a great object. I may have been in love with it. So I wanted to design an easel and painting skill worthy of players’ lofty expectations in The Sims 3.

To add variety, there were three different canvas sizes. To add depth and collectability, some paintings were uncommon and rare (known as brilliant and masterpiece paintings). To add character, certain personality Sims would paint unique variations of paintings.

And I wanted players to barely ever see the same painting twice.

By now you’re thinking, Holy Bella. That’s a metric dumpload of content… sounds insane. And you’re right. A few dozens of paintings were within scope, but each one had to be painted by a digital artist, so it took a lot of time. Here’s one of my favorites:

     

But a hundred or more? Out of the question. This was where I either had to scope my design, or get creative.

Creativity won out. Looking around, The Sims 3 team was filled with people that loved to make things, so why not tap into that?

We set up an invitation for everyone on the team to submit personal artwork with only a few guidelines. (1) It must look like art, (2) you must have rights to it and (3) photographs are okay but only if they’ve been highly filtered and were without human figures. 

The response was fantastic.

This post is continued in Team-Wide Content Creation on The Sims 3 (Part II)... Please check it out here!

07:23 PM
05/04/12
Posted by: SimGuruRay
Categories: PC/Mac Game 
 
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