Welcome back Simmers! You’ve arrived just in time to take part in the next round of voting for our upcoming Stuff Pack – a collaboration between Maxis, and each and every one of you. If you’re just joining us, this is an exciting new project that we unveiled in April, and I’d encourage you to learn more about it in our announcement blog.
This vote will be the most in-depth one yet, and it’s your choices that have helped us create what you’ll be seeing here today. In the initial vote you selected eco-living as a broad theme for this Stuff Pack. In the second vote, you picked your favorite art style that you felt best represented the theme. Our discussions so far have been about how this pack feels, how it looks, and what it’s about… vague concepts that help provide direction as we move forward. In today’s vote though, you’ll be selecting many of the actual assets that you’ll play with when you get your hands on this pack.
In the weeks since our last blog, our concept artists have been hard at work drawing a variety of objects and clothing that fits within the selected art style. For objects, we thought this pack would be well suited for players who want to build a sunroom or a mudroom, and focused on the types of objects you would find in that setting. For clothing, we were really drawn to minimalist clothing done in a country boho style.
Your contributions have continued to be important; the overwhelming response to SimGuruKimmi’s reference post on the forums has provided inspiration for the concept art that you’ll see within the survey.
During development of a typical Stuff Pack, this would be the point in the process where our Art Director would provide recommended selections. We would then meet as a group to discuss what we liked, what we wanted to change, and what we felt was needed to release a cohesive pack. With a community vote, we’re going to have to handle this process a bit differently, and I want to take a moment to explain how this vote will work in the interest of transparency.
In the survey, you’ll select your favorite assets in two categories – one for objects, and one for clothing and Sim accessories. Each section will have a collage that displays the different assets that you can select from. In the objects section, you’ll select up to 28 of your favorite objects. In the clothing section, you’ll select up to 14 of your favorite pieces of clothing and accessories.
Now, while you as an individual may choose a well-rounded pack through your selections, when we tally the entire community’s vote together the balance of what was selected may be skewed. For example, we don’t want to create a pack where a third of our objects are chairs, and all of the pieces of clothing are shirts. We want to make a pack that offers a bit of something for everyone. We’ll be interpreting the voting results to pluck out your top choices across a range of different types of objects and clothing, so that the pack can be used to build a complete room, or dress a Sim in a complementary outfit.
This survey will take approximately ten minutes to complete, as you browse through the art and narrow things down to your top choices. Voting ends on May 21, 2017 at 10AM PT.
Click here to take the survey.
Clearly our concept artists have been busy, and the rest of us on the Stuff Pack team will be getting heavily involved soon. The Feature Vote on June 23rd is just around the corner, so we’ll be holding brainstorms and writing short design blurbs (our term for mini designs comprised of a few sentences). In the meantime, please continue to participate in SimGuruGraham’s Corner on the forums, and make note of these important dates:
• Objects & Clothing Vote (May 18th – May 21st): Browse through the concept art we’ve drawn for the pack, and select your top choices to help us determine which objects and pieces of clothing are included.
• Feature Vote (June 23rd – June 26th): Select the top gameplay feature(s) you want to have included in the pack.
• Pack Icon Vote (Fall): Peruse different icons and select the one that will appear in the pack’s box art and within the in-game catalog.
• Pack Title Vote (Fall): Select a title that best summarizes the pack’s atmosphere and content.
You may find answers to commonly asked questions in the FAQ for this project.
