More homeless Sims: interview with creator

 Posted by (Visited 5332 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Jun 182009
 

On CrunchGear, of all places.

Why is this important now? After all, MMORPGs give you real human interaction on a grand scale. Why simulate it?

While I am a huge fan of the potential of virtual worlds, I don’t think this kind of experimenting could be done in an online environment using other players. MMOs aren’t a recreation of life as The Sims is. Nobody is in danger of starvation, nobody is living a difficult life in a virtual world, and if you tried roleplaying it, you wouldn’t get genuine responses.

— Interview: Rob Burkinshaw, game designer and creator of homeless Sims.

Alice and Kev: homelessness in Sims 3

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Jun 172009
 

Alice and Kev is a marvelously well-written story in blog form documenting the lives of two Sims who are homeless: Kev, a father who suffers from mental illness (and who is also a jerk), and his daughter Alice, who is a good person but also rather unlucky.

It’s rather amazing to read, and the screenshots really make it. Go check it out.

Snap-together games

 Posted by (Visited 7226 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , ,
May 022008
 

This is certainly turning into a booming segment. The latest is Microsoft’s Popfly for Silverlight, which has been out for a while but didn’t have any game stuff. But now there’s Popfly Game Creator.

Today we’re adding something special to Popfly: an early version of our Popfly Game Creator. That’s right: Popfly is about more than mashups and web pages. It’s about making it fun to build things and share them with your friends. And one of the things we’ve heard loud and clear is that games are the kinds of things that people would like to try to build.

What kinds of games can you create? Just about any kind of two-dimensional game, a category that includes things like the original Super Mario™, Frogger™, Asteroids™, and a host of other old arcade games. To make it easy, Popfly is still focused on getting as much done as possible without having to write any code. The game creator has over 15 pre-built game templates for you to try, hundreds of images, animations, backgrounds, and sounds for you to use in the games you create, and, of course, a way for you to write code if you reach the limits of what the user interface can do for you. Since this is Popfly, you can still save, share, and embed your creations everywhere from your blog to your Facebook page to your Windows Vista Sidebar.

Just in the last few months we’ve seen this, and Gamebrix, and Sims Carnival…