![]() In addition to being character-centric, a character's chosen lifestyle/career/hobby needs to provide a stable, steadily-advancing scaffold, needs to exert pressure on their life and the life of those around them, needs to provide small random events and schedule burps, and needs to respond to a character's own personality/pressure/situation outside of the lifestyle.įor example, rather than the farming system Rimworld currently has (identical to other games such as Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft), we would instead have the farmer work fields on a schedule. A character-centric approach would be to allow only that character to build it. Similarly, the progression system needs to be character-centric rather than facility-centric.Īs an example, Rimworld's research system unlocks construction options for the whole base once someone researches how to build it. If we want to make a game that focuses on the lives of the characters, it's critical that their support system is straightforward and robust, so that setbacks can be judged as affecting the characters rather than the support system. Your garden will never be attacked, and even if your whole garden was destroyed, your sims would not die: the baseline habitability would not degrade that far. For example, gardening: you don't have to garden, but if you choose to, it's a steady task that moves forward day after day. They provide a stable, steadily-progressing scaffold for the characters' life stories while also providing a steady diet of life events. Some are very dense, some are not, but they are all optional. The lifestyle options for Sims characters are all side options. It's pretty easy to establish a baseline habitability, and then everything else is just improving things more or having fun with side tasks. You don't have to worry about droughts or animal attacks or hurricanes. I think nearly all of the difference in this contextualization is simply because the 'facility' in The Sims is not a high-stress facility. That may be very upsetting, but it's contextualized as that person dying, not your overall facility degrading. Even death isn't a sign that the house is doing badly, it's a sign that someone's particular story has come to an end. If something in the house goes wrong, like a sink exploding, the player will naturally contextualize it as part of Anna's crappy day rather than a systemic setback. So anything that goes wrong is a bump to your base, even if on paper it's the story of how Anna is depressed and Bob is sick. ![]() Rimworld is about creating a base that can survive all these bumps in the road, even if they pile up. If things go wrong or get delayed, the house will not collapse just because the day job person is being suboptimal.Ĭompare this to Rimworld, where it's very likely that half your base will catch sleeping sickness and then whoever is awake will get too moody and start lighting things on fire, at which point a crowd of monsters will attack. The role of "day job" is less about optimally making money and more about providing a scaffold for life experiences - it shapes both the character that goes to work and everyone they share the house with. As long as there's some source of money, everything else is optional, and there's no real need to optimize your performance. ![]() Each sim has specific traits and skills and goals, they tend to have specific jobs, things can go wrong - it's very similar to Rimworld in that regard.īut the house they live in is not a complex machine.Īlthough you can build your house with astonishing attention to detail, it is not self-sufficient and doesn't need to be. It's a different setting, but The Sims has most of the same kind of setup as Rimworld when it comes to people. The inhabitants, no matter how diligently simulated, are cogs in that machine. It's about creating an ever-more-complex self-sufficient machine. It doesn't even really feel like "the story of that person", it just feels like one of the cogs in your machine is wobbly.Ī base building game like Rimworld is about building bases. If someone loses a pet and goes into a long mourning slump, the player has to try and keep them from going berserk or spending days just wandering around. This is because those events are framed in terms of how they affect the facility rather than how they affect the person. Despite getting sad over losing their dog, or having a bad case of the plague, or dating someone, the character stories don't really have a strong impact on the player. Not only their stats and skills, but also their moods, personalities, traits, and so on.īut it's difficult to feel the "story" of these people. For example, in Rimworld each member of your crew is simulated in great detail. A genre about people.īase building games are including more and more "personal simulations" about the people in those bases. There's a new genre hiding in plain sight.
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