SimCity Series
Trashing buildings in SimCity 4
May 10th
Ocean Quigley shares more of his time spent with the classic SimCity 4. This time, Ocean talks a little about the plans for decaying buildings in the game. They were trying to figure out the best approach for the buildings to degrade over time – through various conditions and sprites. But it turns out that they couldn’t do all of the things they wanted to do due to memory and disk space constraints!
Each building could have it’s own custom, automatically generated “crud” map (a combination of ambient occlusion and 3D noise rendered through the source geometry). Just multiply it over the base building to make it dirty.
Each building could also have automatically generated window masks (normally used to make the windows glow at night). Just multiply those over the building and the windows start looking dark and dingy.
We could break the window masks into sections and apply them independently for a further stage of decay (we didn’t wind up doing that, having to save memory as I recall)
As things go from bad to worse, we could mask a tiling boarded-up-window texture through one of the window channels.
Since the game was in an isometric perspective, we could pre-render “crater” decals and lay them over the building, making it look like parts of the facade had fallen off.
SimCity 4 development pictures
Apr 16th
Were you aware that Ocean Quigley also worked on the beautiful SimCity 4? I didn’t until today (I never paid much attention to the credits in the manuals). He has posted a couple of development pictures of the game in his blog.
I’m particularly proud of the roads and networks. They’re composed of hundreds of different tiles that could combine in thousands of ways (intersections of all sorts, and connections between roads and highways, roads and rail, etc.).
And we had to figure out how to conform the terrain to them, adding bridges, leveling, making retaining walls, and the like. And it had to be seamless, so that the player would just draw out what they wanted and the system would figure out what to do automatically.
Designing them was like taking a 6 month long IQ test. These are a few design prototypes that helped me to think through some of the problems.
SimCity 3000 – Rays of Light and UFO Attack posters
Apr 16th
Ocean Quigley, most known as the Art Director for Spore has been uploading some of his past works to his blog. He worked on SimCity 3000 back in the late 90′s, and he has posted 2 posters from the game:
GDC 2009: EA Mobile’s Mike Pagano Wages War on chubby fingers
Mar 23rd
Gamasutra has an article with EA Mobile’s Mike Pagano speaking about developing games for the iPhone. He speaks on the fact that the game’s created on Apple’s products are not ports, but built from the ground up. He also goes on about the development time with the games – Spore Origins took 4 months while SimCity took 92 days.
Adapting to the iPhone extends beyond UI and control, and affects game design and length. “When we’re looking at mobile games, we see them as shorter experiences,” Pagno continued. “We like to take that and expand on it. Spore Origins [for other mobile devices] was originally a two-hour game, and we took it to a five-hour game for the iPhone.”
Pagano also revealed the relatively quick development times for his three iPhone projects – Spore Origins was completed in four months, plus one month of QA. Yahtzee! Adventures took an estimated three months, and SimCity, he said, took “I think 92 days, from start to finish.”
“That was very fast. We were very tired. Method Solutions did a fantastic job on that.”
Another important factor when deciding to adapt a game to the iPhone, Pagano said, was the availability of high-res assets. “We had to redesign a lot of the assets on SimCity because it was built for an older PC,” said Pagano. The original SimCity was, of course, a low-resolution sprite-based game – high resolution assets were not available for the port, so a lot of time was spent generating new art.
Gamasutra – GDC 09′ EA’s Mike Pagano Wages War on Fat Fingers
I’m your God now! *steals ladder*
Mar 16th
I normally don’t play a lot of PC games. Just about every PC game that I have owned and played have been simulation/god games. I don’t think it’s my thrill of playing god, I just find the games to simply be enjoyable. Not to mention many of the games are customizable with user-created content. Tech Radar brings an article about playing god in video games, with The Sims and SimCity being their fine points:
It doesn’t matter what the game is, and don’t pretend you’ve never done it. Everyone who’s played The Sims has, at one time or another, locked a whole family in a room with no toilet, or stolen the ladder from their swimming pool, or stripped someone naked at a dinner party just to watch the reaction.
It’s human nature, not necessarily to be complete bastards, but to poke and prod at the rules of a universe for no greater purpose than to see what happens when we do. The bastard bit simply adds a bit of spice. Or a lot of spice, if the game you’re playing is doing its job properly.
Playing god gives us all the power in the world, and done properly, the game it comes wrapped in is simply a nice bonus. The strange thing is that as much fun as the genre should be to play, only a handful have ever truly made it work…
They’ve got a point…I can’t count the times I took the ladder out of the pool, built walls around my characters to trap them, even setting them on fire. No, I’m not sick and twisted like that in real life…but in the games, it’s a whole different set of rules. I just wonder what new ways we can come up with disposing our characters in The Sims 3….From what I have read so far, the pool ladder won’t work anymore!
SimCity. Needs. Zombies.
Mar 11th
I enjoy the Zombie genre. Resident Evil, Dead Rising, George A. Romero’s films, Left 4 Dead…even the zombies from the Sims series. I just can’t get enough of them! Put them in other games, and what would you get? Well, IGN went with that idea and came up with 10 games that Zombies should star in.
One of those games is SimCity. With disasters such as fires, earthquakes, tornados, ufo and even robot attacks, where is the love for a zombie infestation!? We could have a viral outbreak to where we would have to plant and manage the police/fire stations as well as manage a the scientific building’s funds for a cure. It would be an interesting thing to watch played out.
Speaking of this, it reminds me of Bil Simser. If you’ve been in the community ever since the starting days of the original “The Sims”, this name will ring a bell. Well, he was given the “Edith” program that Maxis used to program the behaviors and interactions between Sims and objects. One of his ideas was to create a mini-game of a zombie outbreak and your sim characters were equipped with a shotgun to fend for themselves. It never made it to reality though 
Flashback: SimCity64 for the N64DD
Mar 3rd
Long long time ago, during the Nintendo 64 lifespan, an addon for the N64 was released in Japan called the “Disk Drive”. Known as the N64DD for short, it was a small device that attached under the N64 which allowed you to use CD based media. Well, I managed to find a video of SimCity64, a game that was developed by HAL Laboratory (the same creators of Super Smash Brothers). Take a look below at what we missed:
I myself would of loved for the N64DD to be released worldwide. I remembered that there were plans to add onto The Legend of Zelda 64 by including more dungeons and gameplay. Do’h, would of been a blast to play!
PC World – The Ten Greatest PC Games Ever
Feb 10th
PCWorld compiled a list of what they believe to be the 10 greatest PC Games of all time. The Sims and SimCity (original) both made it on the list. The full list of games are below, with their ranking:
10. Trade Wars 2002
9. Myst
8. The Sims
7. StarCraft
6. Rogue
5. M.U.L.E.
4. SimCity
3. Civilization
2. Doom
1. World of Warcraft
What gets me is the reactions from all of the people commenting on the article. So far, the tally of recommendations from people that agree/disagree are 53 Yes, 115 No. While I do believe that most of these games are influential, I have to disagree on the fact that they are the best games of all time…Many games are missing – Half Life 2, GTA series, Leisure Suit Larry (I can’t believe I was playing this game when I was around 10-12 years old)! However, I do have to agree with The Sims and SimCity…but then again I’m biased because I run a fansite for those games, LOL.
Actually…after thinking about it is it even possible to compile a list of the 10 best PC games? There was such a huge market and so many great games available…They’d probably be better off listing the top 100 PC games.
Walrus Magazine – Let’s All Be Neighbours on Will Wright Street
Feb 6th
It took Will Wright seven years to complete Spore, which sold more than a million copies in the three weeks after its release. This was entirely predictable. In 1989, he released SimCity, in which play-ers assume the role of architect, urban planner, real estate developer, unelected mayor, and Jane Jacobs, and it was an immediate success, positioning Wright at the top of the video game food chain. Maxis, the company he started with his partner Jeff Braun, has gone on to create more than two dozen Sim games, including the highly addictive SimTower and the bad-dream-giving SimAnt, as well as SimFarm, SimSafari, and Sim-Health — all in addition to the blockbuster Sims series, launched in 2000 and now in its third and most ambitious iteration. In Wright’s new game, Sims 3, released this month, your avatar is free to leave the compound that limited its movement in Sims and Sims 2, so an entire neighbourhood is now yours to survey, manipulate, and obsess over.
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