#sims 4 wants and fears

[rebouks]

The first day of the new school year began much the same as any other; being accosted by the hallway monitor for dawdling, having inappropriate footwear and daring to possess yet another pair of headphones, only for them to remember who he was and abandon any hopes of receiving an explanation, or an excuse.

Robin thought he would’ve outgrown his selective mutism by now, but apparently, it didn’t work like that. He’d eventually seen a therapist a few years prior, but the poor man didn’t exactly have a handbook for “strange child who can’t speak sometimes due to other people’s overwhelming head voices but won’t/can’t explain himself to anyone other than a ghost who’s stuck in his attic” so, it’d fallen a little flat. At least, that’s what he kept telling himself; but the older he got, the more he started to think he’d been using his gift as a convenient excuse for some of his issues. Maybe. Possibly.

Much less bombarded than when he was little, Robin could usually tune out the everyday chatter within surrounding minds, though he rarely did. He’d become far too accustomed to being nosy, and at this point it was weirder NOT to hear everyone else’s thoughts. It produced an intense itchy feeling that was almost impossible to ignore, as though he’d miss something important the moment he stopped listening.

As a result, Robin struggled to live in the moment, and for himself; constantly juggling other people’s thoughts and emotions as well as his own. Sometimes he wondered if he’d understand his brain better if it belonged to someone else, like if he could observe it from a distance as with everyone else, it’d make more sense-.. or maybe paying more attention in Mr Fitzherbert’s biology classes would help. He supposed he was still overwhelmed after all, just better at hiding it.

Either way, he wasn’t about to admit to all this nonsense out loud, especially not if it landed him in Doctor Abbott’s office again. The last thing he wanted was for anyone to find out how weird he actually was, least of all a psychologist. Think of all the experiments they’d want to do, all the prodding and poking-.. or worse. Robin shuddered at the thought. No, thank you!

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[omgkayplays]

🧪🧫🔬

[beachyserasims]

Geneva Island Legacy┃Chapter five┃Summer Charity (Part 3 of 3)

~ Transcript ~

Beginning / Previous / Next

Thank you to everyone who has tagged along! This story is my creative outlet and I love sharing it with you all.

To Be Continued in Chapter 6!!

[holocene-sims]

i love it ❣️

alternate caption: adventures in alpha hair

[moonhze]

light rays in the break room.

[nitrozem]

He is adorable in a scruffy country boy kinda way

[aurorangen]

It was about time for Renee to find out

Transcript & Context:

[Renee walks along the beach and sees Robbie with his friends…and Keon]

Renee: I need to speak to you. Robbie: [sighs] What do you want? Spit it out here. Renee: Alone.

Renee: Stay away from Keon. Robbie: Why should I do that? [under his breath] My god you're so fucking annoying. Renee: [debating whether to tell him what happened] He's trouble.

Robbie: I don't know what history you two have or how you even know him, but at least Keon treats me like someone. Not invisible like you do to me at school. Renee: Why can't you listen to me for once? I'm telling you the truth-

Robbie: When things go well, you come and ruin it. But do you know how humiliating it was starting high school and getting ignored by your sister? Oh you don't want to be related to the loser with no friends. Renee: [quietly then loses it] No, it's not like that, that's not fucking important right now-

Robbie: How your reputation as top student would fall if you talked to me? How people pity you for having a brother with issues? Renee: [Renee has never been this angry] Robbie, shut up and listen to me.

Robbie: Get lost. I don't wanna hear it.

I know I didn't show any of their interactions at school or focus much on Robbie having a hard time, but everything he said is true: Renee has not been the most supportive big sister. Being overshadowed by her all his life, pressure from his Dad as a kid, favouritism, low confidence, everything adds up to how he is now. And it really is a shame he doesn't believe Renee.

[agena87]

New headcanon/universe drop: Jacques Villareal remarried (he's too hot to stay single, OK?), and his second wife is no other than Mallory Landgraab. And they even have a son together, Theo!

Luna was NOT happy when she discovered that her (now ex) best friend was dating her father, and even less when Lory got pregnant and Jacques proposed. Nancy, predictably, disowned her daughter (for "treason to the family name"). Which in turn meant that Geoffrey finally had enough and filled for divorce (he could bear with his wife cheating on him for all the duration of their relationship, and even the fact that some of his children weren't actually his, but the way she treated the kids? No more.). Malcolm couldn't care less, as long as his twin was happy, she could marry a hay bale and he wouldn't flinch. Johnny threw a "Happy disownment" party for his sister and made her promise that if Jacques ever hurt her in any way, that she would tell him; Don had some cousins who could help make the problem disappear (he said he was joking, but who knows?). Hugo didn't care either; their father was happy once again, it was all that mattered. Max started calling Mallory "the Trophy"; name that Luna adopted too, now that her friendship with Lory was definitively ruined. Max, though, doesn't actually mind Lory, she's just a little brat (I mean, she's Max, so: duh!). As for Olivia and Teresa (Johnny, Mal, and Lory's younger sisters), they were too young at the time to really understand the age gap, and all that they cared about was if the baby would be a girl or a boy (they were a bit disappointed when they learned they would have a nephew, and not a niece, but they still adore the little boy - and anyway, about a year or two later, they got the niece they wanted, Joy).

Fun fact, Lory is quite taller than Jacques (at least 10 centimetres, maybe even 15); and that's without heels. Lory & Mal both inherited their tall frame from their mother.

[fadedflora]

it sucks to have to be scared to update the game, no matter the size of the update, because you have no idea if it's going to break your game or not (not to mention going through the process of updating your mods)

[johnnyzest]

anybody got a therapy mod

[victorluvsalice]

-->While Smiler was bopping away, Victor had finished his upgrading, so I had him transportalate down to the greenhouse, change into more appropriate clothes, and start tending all the plants (a process made a little bit harder today by his bees being angry about life and stinging him occasionally). Alice, meanwhile, was stopped from going out to shower in the rain (Erratic Sims…) and forced to finish her breakfast and take a quick wolf nap to calm her instincts before I sent her out to feed Toothy the cowplant and the poor starving chickens. Fortunately going out in the thunderstorm didn’t make her scared (one of the few perks of a Sim being Erratic) – though it did break her umbrella, so that wasn’t great. Despite this, though, she got everybody fed, cleaned out the coop, and got all five eggs waiting in said coop without incident. Feeling both proud of her for staying on task and bad that I'd made her work in the rain, I then directed her to head inside and up to her and Victor’s bedroom, before having her change into her outfit with the Delicate “bad mood calming” bracelet and start working on her latest book again (the mystery “Who Stole The Tarts?” in case you need a reminder – I did!). She plugged away at that for a bit while I checked in on Victor – he’d finished all his tending, so I decided to have him super-sell his garden –

After he’d bonded with his bees to stop them being so angry. And after he’d evolved his taro root. And after he’d gathered soy wax off his soy plant. And after he’d gotten a pee – which involved him magically fixing the downstairs toilet because at some point it broke (I think the moment he tried to sit down on it, in fact). And after he’d given Surprise a lecture on scratching the furniture. I’m saying it took a WHILE to get to super-selling all that produce. XD But he did get there eventually, poor guy!

-->And then I looked at Alice again and noticed her Fury was getting really high because, despite her bracelet’s best efforts, her “gotta be outside” werewolf instincts were giving her lip. I quickly sent her out into the backyard (fortunately the rain had calmed down to a drizzle at this point, AND her umbrella was back in good repair) and had her somber howl to lower her Fury – then, deciding I wanted to be extra safe on a party day, sent her back up to the séance room to meditate the rest of it away. Smiler, meanwhile, was finally allowed to stop dancing for the camera (I’d left them like that for a while because, uh, it was just easier ^^;) and upload the video to their production station so they could start editing it and adding effects and transitions and all that jazz. Victor, for his part, finished his super-selling at last – I immediately made him Repairio the wind farm (those things break SOOO MUCH) and smash up a twisted tendril growing outside Moory’s pen before having him harvest the prairie grass in said pen. XD No rest for the wicked – or the magical! Though he got a pretty good harvest out of the prairie grass – not only did he bundle up plenty of hay, he also found a bottle of potato nectar – and a bottle of VITALITY nectar. AKA the nectar that can deage Sims and bring ghosts back to life. O.o So yeah, that right there? That is the GOOD stuff. Have to remember to get him to store it in the aging racks later!

-->Anyway – while Victor was getting that done, Smiler uploaded and hyped their finished video (just in time for it to be included in the royalty money for the day, nice), then ran downstairs to lecture Shock for scratching furniture and drinking from puddles. I couldn’t get a good picture of either as Shock kept running away from Smiler to do something else as they tried to lecture her (like going to drink from puddle in the bathroom while Smiler was trying to tell her no scratching the living room chairs), but the lessons DID take, and Shock has learned not to do either thing anymore. Hooray! I then had Smiler mop up all the puddles around the place and take a quick shower as I checked in on Alice – to my delight, she was completely Fury-less! Yay! :D And even better, I quickly discovered an activity to keep her busy while I tried to wrangle Smiler and Victor (Smiler, finished with their shower, was trying to mold the clay blob in the bathroom from last episode while Victor wanted to chat with them) – the laundry! The hamper was starting to look a biiit full, so I had her search everyone’s pockets, then load up the washer with the clothes and a chrysanthemum and set them tumbling. Victor and Smiler had headed back up to Smiler’s room to dance to the tunes coming out of their radio at this point, so I just had Alice head up and join them for a little dance party –

[errantce]

oh yeah diego's FINISHED

[simbico]

Hugo: “I’ve been thinking about us revisiting the floral shop idea we had awhile back.”

Amantius: “I know you’re bored with work right now but I don’t know if we can manage that. We have more responsibilities with the kids that we didn’t have back then.”

Hugo: “Two of them are in school now, Fern will be a teen soon, I’m sure we could manage it together!”

Amantius: “I need time to think about it but I promise I will.”

Hugo: “Thank you, love💕”

[narcissumnarcissi]

[redsasexualdisaster]

its finally happened they are all here and with no cc (thats why they look so bad ;u; )

[l-1-z-a]

Emergent Storytelling Techniques in The Sims - Matt Brown, GDC 2018

In this 2018 GDC session, Maxis EA's Matt Brown examines the various techniques employed across all four generations of The Sims to empower player-driven and emergent storytelling.

Table of Contents

Intro

1:40 Key Design Philosophies

3:40 Ai of the Sims

7:02 Self-evident Dependencies

8:09 Projection and Assumption

12:34 Ambiguity ( thought bubbles, speech )

16:01 Going 'too far'

17:16 On Randomness... ( urinals )

19:30 Yes and...

21:02 Autonomous Feedback Loops

24:51 Wants & Fears & Wishes

26:36 Story Trees

31:26 How Story Trees work

- 33:45 ...vs Player Expectations

35:58 Meta-Storytelling ( story progression; higher level )

39:51 Prototype Story Progression Tool

- 40:55 Bubba's life story

42:09 Inverse Autonomy ( populating the world )

43:19 N of M and Moving the Goalpost

47:13 Summary

48:54 Questions

This is a very informative presentation from Matt Brown. He was Technical Direction and Desing during the development of The Sims 2.

The presentation reveals how the systems of wants, fears and whims works in all games of the series. How the system of story progression and promotion in Sims 3 works. Shows the prototype system of story progression in Sims 3. This presentation have info about all main games in The Sims.

And a few other things to pay attention to:

1. Previously unseen screenshot of The Sims 2 Beta, or rather a screenshot from the alpha version of The Sims 2 v.0.14.0.765 on 23:30:

2. The answer to the question of why each part of the series is very different from each other. What process is responsible for this. On 53:35:

Hi. I've played all of The Sims and they all change a lot between each of the iterations and I'm curious what the process is from going the first Sim all the way to the newest Sim because there's a lot of changes between all of those.

And the answer of Matt Brown:

The first Sims was Will Wright makes games. I don't know if he still does, but the way he did make games was he made games that were fundamentally fascinating to him. They actually tended to be pretty geeky because he's pretty geeky.

The first Sims was really more of a psychological study originally. It turned out to be way more fun than that. Well, that's fun for some people. It's way bigger than that.

I used to joke that with Sims 2 our goal was don't screw it up. It's a little more colorful than that, but don't screw it up because we didn't know exactly why Sims 1 was successful. We just knew that it was crazy successful, so just don't mess it up.

With Sims 2, we didn't make that many changes. It was what I call a more, more, more design or 3M design. We mostly just took everything in Sims 1 and we added more to it. The wants and fears that I mentioned was the one big thing that we introduced there.

And then in Sims 3, it was slightly different because we hadn't screwed it up. We had a chance to screw it up, so we basically went all the way back down to the core motivations of players and the core systems and said what systems, what were they trying to achieve and could we achieve more or if the system wasn't really didn't have any purpose in the end we got rid of it.

Sims 4 was a little more complicated. Its development was pretty storied. It went through several different stages.

3. Some players think that wants and fears in Sims 2 are given to Sims at random. The developers of The Sims 2 discovered that some players thought so, and were little disappointed by this. And so the system of wants in The Sims 3 has become more clear. You can learn about this at 58:24. This is one more question:

Are there any game mechanics introduced that did not have the outcome you expected?

And the answer of Matt Brown:

That's a really good question. I'm trying to think. I'm absolutely certain there are. But I honestly don't know any right off the top of my head. Part of that is that a lot of the mechanics that we introduce...

No, I really can't think of anything off the top of my head. No, sorry.

I was going to say, a lot of the mechanics that we introduce, in and of themselves, this is going to sound maybe pretentious or dodgy, but in and of themselves, we don't necessarily expect a specific outcome from one system. We expect a lot of the times when we're designing systems, we design them to be interesting, to bounce off of each other. We just try to make sure that there's enough touch points between them that interesting stuff can happen.

Oh, I do have one, and it was a subtle thing. Sorry, it was back in this Wants and Fears. Maybe it's just a little cautionary tale. These Wants and Fears in the original version, they're very thoughtfully presented. If you do it right, your sims will sound like they're just paying attention. Oh my god. They get something. They're deep. There's a lot going on in there.

Somewhere along the line, what we did is every morning when the sim wakes up, they roll new Once and Fears. They reevaluate. Somewhere in there, we decided that the way we should do that so you didn't miss it was we should make them spin like slot machine wheels, which honestly made me really angry in the end. Not angry, but was because the effect it had was that players then saw them, and because they look like slot machines, a lot of players assumed they were random, which, given that we put all this effort into the system that made them extra not random and very intentional, was a little disappointing that some players thought that they were random just because of the way we ended up treating them in the UI.

Transcription (notes) of presentation:

На русском языке: