When & Where: Over on r/Sims3, Sunday May 11th @11am PDT!
Direct Link: Sims AMA on r/Sims3

People who know me are very familiar with my propensity to have a story to tell about pretty much anything. And if the topic is remotely game design related, the story inevitably begins with "Back on The Sims..."

I sometimes joke that my stories aren't interesting, but at least they're long... (awkwardly repurposing the opening of Annie Hall as a veiled dad joke). But The Sims is such a fascinatingly broad experience that the design thinking, experimentation, prototyping, etc. over the franchise's history really does touch so many different areas of game design, player psychology (and human psychology), engineering and art. 

That said, the games and the Sims themselves are so relatable and easily digestible that people often don't realize how much thought and passion has gone into pretty much every corner and aspect, nor how complex much of the design and implementation is just to make tiny little, imaginary, relatable lives work.

Anyhow... I figured I could help "fix" that by answering as many questions as I can about The Sims, it's development, quirks, secrets, and just generally chat about a game that's been such a big part of my life as a player and a creator.
​

  

The story of Story Progression in The Sims 3 is, well... storied.

​Early in the development of The Sims 3, we decided that we wanted the game to have a much more open world.  In contrast to the isolated, single home lots in Sims 1 and Sims 2, we wanted a bustling neighborhood, one that felt like a community full of interesting Sims and emergent stories to explore and become part of.  But that was going to require a ton of autonomous Sims running around, and that in turn would require an unmanageable amount of simulation.

But as we started talking through the problem, we realized that most of what Sims do moment to moment is really generally pretty unimportant, and extremely so if the player isn't watching them.  The Sims down the block don't need to use the toilet.  But once the player's Sims start forming relationships with the neighbor across the street and the guy they met at the gym downtown, those Sims need to advance (at a macro level) alongside the player's Sims in order to prevent player stories from breaking down. Your teenage sweetheart story isn't nearly as cute when one becomes an "elder" and the other is still a teen :).

This video explains a bit about how we arrived at the design of Story Progression and shows off the original prototype running a sample neighborhood simulation.  Check it out!

P.S.: Oh!  And check out the Story Progression page elsewhere on this site for somehow even more details.

Way, way back in 2006, as we were doing early design and tech exploration with an extremely small team (<10 of us, half technical designers), we experimented with weekly 8-hour game jams as a way of loosening up and finding weird inspiration.  We referred to those efforts as Senseless Prototyping Mondays.

This was the first of those prototypes.​  It's rather entirely too silly.

Hey all!  I'll do formal introductions in a bit, but since I'm going to make this live now, I figured at least an explanation was in order.

I'm Matt Brown.  I spent nearly 30 years creating and directing video games at big "AAA" game studios as an engineer and a designer.  Now, I've decided to finally step back and develop my own largely solo project. No studio.  No team.  No net.

I'm still working through what form my first project will take but rest assured that it will smoosh together several of the things I love... as a player and as a designer. 

If I were putting money on it, I'd bet on playful simulation, emergent storytelling, open exploration, some sweet grindy bits, maybe a dash of procedural somethings and probably some tiny things shooting at other tiny things that don't like them all that much.


As for the site, I intend to use it both for updates on that project as I wander, but also as a bit of an evolving archive of weird corners of my work over my career (and some from my fully-witting accomplices).  That will mostly take the form of prototypes that were made during development of games I've been a part of (The Sims, FIFA, God of War, World of Warcraft, SimCity), but I suspect there'll be ranting and other nonsense mixed in along the way.

Follow me on various social platforms if you're curious, and I'll always drop a note here when something new and shiny or old and crunchy appears regardless.