The Sims 2

Early Development Information and Screens of The Sims 2 have been released

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The Sims 2 is a timeless game that still many simmers like to revisit and play form time to time. After all – it’s one of the best selling PC games of the 21st century! However, you can’t help but wonder what effort and process did it take to create such a popular game.

A few weeks ago The Plumbob Hellscape managed to uncover an interesting .pdf file released by Andrew Willmott, one of the developers who worked on The Sims 2 since its first days of development. Down below you can check out some of the never-before seen images of The Sims 2 during it’s development days. We’ll be explaining these images more right below the image gallery and also try to sum up some of the interesting facts about The Sims 2’s development that were mentioned in the document.

  • The Sims 2 started with development in early 2000.
  • The team at the beginning of development was consisted of only 5-20 people, but as the time has gone by it’s been expanded with 250 people working on the game.
  • The game was originally planned for release in January 2004 but was delayed to September 2004.
    • The team wasn’t able to develop pools in time for the planned January 2004 release – luckily the release date delay helped them create the pools feature from scratch.
  • The Sims 2 was shipped with 4 CDs, 11,000 animations, 1.1 million lines of code, 2,400 UI images and 1GB of sound data.
  • Maxis relied on Sims 1 textures and animations on the beginning of the development but the game was shipped with 100% original assets and textures made for The Sims 2.
  • A Sim’s animation skeleton was built with 27 facial targets, 64 weighted bones and 116 bones in total, including grips and other registration points.
  • Artists were not locked down on the polygon count.
  • The developers had a lot of ambitious plans which left them scrambling them at the end of base game development.
  • The team had big pressure from EA.
  • Developers weren’t really sure how much new stuff and features were enough for the game.

You can check out the full, 83-page document that explains and talks more about the development process, challenges and obstacles HERE!

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Jovan

Reticulating splines...

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