SimGuru Spotlight: FreePlay Interviews

2021-12-14

SimGuruMegz

Hi Simmers!

For the last two weeks, we’ve been partying like it’s 2011! On 15 December ten years ago, The Sims FreePlay launched on the app stores. We’ve come a long way since then – the game released without classic Sims features like marriage or having children! Through live service updates, our team of developers were able to release patches and updates to significantly change and improve the gameplay based on your feedback, and continually add more major features like pregnancy – it took us around seven years to finally add the full experience so you could raise a family just like you can in any Sims game (let’s not forget Augmented Reality, Architect Homes and the Party Boat)!

To continue our celebrations of the ‘Party of the Decade’, our SimGurus from EA Firemonkeys Studio have come together for a special anniversary episode of SimsTV to reminisce on our history and take a trip down memory lane. 

A couple of weeks ago, SimGuruAlana posted a tweet asking for your hard-hitting questions that you’ve always wanted to know about FreePlay so we picked 10 of them to celebrate our 10^th birthday! We hope you enjoy our discussion on the thought processes behind decisions we’ve made during development, plus what it's like working on one of the most treasured gaming franchises in the world! Our answers are summarized below for you to enjoy.

Wishing you a safe and happy holiday season. Join the SimGurus on Twitter and show us how your Sims are celebrating this Christmas! #SFPPartyoftheDecade

- SimGuruMegz

Community Questions 

“Who chooses the "player favorite" events and how do you pick what live events will run or rerun?”

• EA Creator @Catharina_Sims & player @ashht07

SimGuruRhys: We’re always keeping an eye on social media to see all of your requests. We also have SimGuruAlana to help pass on your requests! We collate all of the information and pass it on to the game team, usually to SimGuruIceFox and our design team.  We’ll get in a room, discuss what's recently been rerun, and see it we can fit it in! There are some events we haven't rerun, and we would love to, but sometimes there are technical issues that prevent us from doing that. Not to say they won't come, we just need tech effort to get us there. If you’ve got one that you’re really keen to see, let us know and stay tuned!

SimGuruMegz: That’s right! Tag SimGuruRhys on Twitter to make it happen.

“How are Architect Homes chosen and why are some doors/stairs missing [in the final live build]?”

• EA Creator @simtowntwins, players @didip1000 & @TheSimsLlama

SimGuruPenny: Great question! For those that arent familiar, after you complete the Extreme Home Takeover quest, you can build your own style of houses and submit them to us at Firemonkeys [through the Architect Homes tab]. Every fortnight, we look through the submissions that people have given and choose our favourites to release back out so all players can enjoy your amazing creations!

Out of all of the tasks we do, this is one of the most inspiring. We’re constantly blown away by what you come up with, the innovation, the floorplans, the new ideas and trends – it's so fun! People are building flat level homes using lots of counter tops. At one point, everyone was building indoor pools. It’s wild! 
When we’re picking out our favourites, we look at the floorplan, style, colour scheme, overall innovation, and cohesion in the lot - including if it's functional. We try to look for some of the same things that you as players look for when you want to build these amazing homes. 
The reason why some of the doors and stairs are missing - there are some items that get automatically stripped when they're submitted. They get caught and removed through a product filter and end up being blank spaces in the house instead. 

“Will there ever be bigger lots like 30x30 or 50x40? Plus, will we ever get different room shapes or floating rooms?”

• Player @NeelSimsPlay

SimGuruYak: Our current lot sizes are standard (18×18) or premium (36×18). There’s also House Boats and apartments which are also different sizes. SimTown is currently full and can't get any bigger, we can't add more lots or make the lots bigger to this area without having to redo the map entirely. 

Over the last few years we’ve been working on ways to add more variety to lots spaces for you to build, so you can avoid demolishing your current lots as much as possible. Things like removing fences around the lots, which makes it feel much more open. Changing the size of the lots is something we may consider for the future! There are a few challenges and technical issues which will have to be factored into our plans. 

SimGuruMegz: The same goes for different shaped rooms - I think it’s fair to say the team are investigating how we can bring it to the game.

SimGuruYak: It's been considerably challenging because of the technical decisions that were made back when we first started which was the foundations of how we set up [different shaped rooms]. It’s been quite difficult without rewriting large chunks of code to get L-shaped rooms to the game, its definitely been a lot of effort but it's been fun!  

“Will we ever be able to have more than 10 Sims on a lot?”

• EA Creator @SalixTheCat

SimGuruYak: That’s another decision that was made years ago and was partly to do with performance reasons. The peak device – latest and greatest iPhone that released at the time was the 4S. A lot of decisions were made because of that. [To this day] we want to make sure that there’s a broad range of devices that people are using, and that they’re all having as close to the same experience across the board.  We’ll need to do some investigation as to what the impact of changing that [limit of 10 Sims] might be. 

“Are there any challenges updating a game that is 10 years old?”

• Player @khelafriday

SimGuruGrumpyCat: Hmm, no. 

SimGuruMegz: Haha – we're all nodding furiously!

SimGuruGrumpyCat: No, absolutely - there are MANY challenges! I don’t think any of us expected when we set out that we’d be here, now. We had grand ideas of course, but no one has the hubris to think 10 years down the track “this is where we’ll be”. We’ve got so much content now, its crazy. So many systems, features, it’s a really big complex game so there are ALOT of considerations that go in when we have to put new things in. Everyone in this call could talk to that for hours! SimGuruRhys, SimGuruPenny and SimGuruIceFox absolutely could go into detail about content planning, and delivery, putting it in and how that works. But particularly putting in new features or changing existing features, putting a new actions and new types of objects can be a really big challenge. It can touch many different things in the game. 

SimGuruYak: If we do add something new, we don’t want to break anything that is already existing. If we do change anything we want to make it better, we don’t want to make it worse. It’s a juggling act to try and add new features and keep everything else ticking over as it should be. 

“I would like to know when we are going to get different body and room shapes? Because with this feature the game will look more realistic. We’ve been waiting for a long time.”

• Player @FaizaMansoor20  

SimGuruIceFox: Thankyou for the question. Room shapes were just answered by SimGuruYak and GrumpyCat, so I’ll leave that because they answered well. I’ll talk about the body shapes part of the question – this is a huge one that gets asked all the time and dare I say it’s one of the biggest requests we have internally as well. 

Body shapes is something that is incredibly difficult, probably even more so than the room shapes that Yak was talking about before and for the same reasons that were touched on earlier for pregnancy – [the reason why we haven't done it yet] is because the game was never set up that way. FreePlay was never built to support body shapes and what that really means if we were to introduce a new shape (wider, skinnier, hips with slightly different curvature) we would be saying no to all of the features and functionality that we currently have in the game. It means that any clothing, chairs, objects in the house that you’d want them to interact with (they wouldn’t be able to sit, pick something from the fridge, drink coffee) and no animations would work with them either. We’d be starting from scratch to bring that variation in body shapes that we all desperately want to see, as it won’t fit in the game that exists today. Also, no prizes that players have earned in the past would be compatible. It's a really big endeavor because it also impacts gender, height, life stage. It's probably easier to make a new game, which is why our hands are tied and we haven't been able to achieve it up to this time. 

SimGuruMegz: The whole FreePlay team feel extremely passionately about diversity and inclusion and our most content roadmap has been focused on delivering authentic content that’s inspired by different cultures like LGBTQIA+ for Pride Month, Diwali, Morocco, Japan, Hispanic Heritage Month, and we’re not done. We know how important body shapes are to feel represented and seen, including face shapes and skin tones.  The entire team have put a lot of thought into body shapes and if we could do it, we want to approach it respectfully and do it right for all age groups – this feature means just as much to all of us, as it does to all of you. It means tweaking 10 years' worth of content in the game, textures, mesh, animations - which would be one of the biggest undertakings every discipline in the game team would ever attempt. We want to say thank you to everyone who's always reaching out to us – SimGuruAlana also sees it and hears it every single day - and giving us pointers on how to make the game better, we’ll look to be as inclusive as possible in other ways.

SimGuruIceFox: We are also investigating other ways to bring more diversity to the game. We’re hoping to change how the Sims faces are textured [improve their overall appearance] and other diversity and inclusion initiatives that you send us. Hijabs (from our January 2021 update) was successful because we had the community support behind it. Also makeup for male Sims, saris for Diwali - all of these options are really valid and need to be in our game, so the more you can help us in the parts that we know we can deliver, it means we can promise to deliver in that space. 

SimGuruYak: I was just going to add, that another challenge for adding new body shapes is that after 10 years of development we have approximately 15,000 different clothing items in the game. Which would mean that they’d all need to be modified or redone to accommodate new body shapes for all age groups.  Big challenge!

“How have players contributed to the game development? Can you give us some examples?”

• EA Creator @SalixTheCat

SimGuruAlana: SimGuruIceFox just mentioned just how much we actually read your comments! When we say, ‘we’ve shared this with the team’, we really mean it! We have Slack channels to discuss your ideas and the whole team jumps in to have conversations around it. We have Pinterest boards as well, which are full of player suggestions for outfits (CAS) and Build/Buy mode that have really influenced what we’ve created over the years.  I remember when I was starting, requests for hijabs was something I saw online every single day, and I would ask the team, ‘What's going on?’ and they would reassure me that “we’re working on it, its coming!’. IceFox has put out questions for wedding content, pride month – we're always leaning on our community for suggestions. 

Another part of it is bug fixing and issues! We really do appreciate it when our players come forward saying there's an issue or that they’ve noticed something wrong with the game, most of the time we’ll chat with the team and ask them if they’ve seen it too. We all work really hard to get the game out [each update] as best we can and when we introduce something new there’s always a chance we break something else (like one of the 15,000 outfits!) but that’s something we also lean on the community for when we need that help to improve our game! The team is so talented here at the studio, we push out updates every 6-8 weeks and are always pumping things out doing their best. We appreciate it when players help us out to make our game better. 

SimGuruIceFox: In our EA Creator Network, our creator Michiiiro recently suggested a theme idea. We did some research and thanks to her help we got her to review the content that we’re making! Basically, we have a whole update based around one of her ideas that she really wanted to see represented in the game. You probably haven't seen it to the extent that we’re bringing it for you all soon, but that will be in our Valentine’s Day update in February. 

SimGuruMegz: Creators actually send through requests from all of you in their community as well! Our creators are an important conduit for passing on feedback to us. 

“What's your favorite feature or item that has been added over the years?”

• EA Creator @Rachybop

SimGuruPenny: My favourite item that we’ve added is actually the rice cooker! I know I've spoken about it before but I'm not sure if it was in an episode of SimsTV or just to my team ranting about how great it was that we did it. A little while ago, we had a content plan for SimChase Season 22: Household Blitz with whitegoods as prizes, computers, female suits for the first time - when I made the plan for what I wanted in this event I put a list together of things I thought were missing in the game. The biggest part I was proud of was delivering a rice cooker, which for a lot of people including myself is a really standard part of a kitchen. So many cultures enjoy rice dishes, it’s the basic of their cuisine - the fact that we’d reached 8 years and hadn't had a rice cooker was mind blowing to me. We ALMOST beat Sims 4 -  just before we released our rice cooker, they beat us by one week! We almost had the first rice cooker in The Sims franchise. Adding that was so exciting to me, seeing players feel represented in such a small way, but in a really meaningful way.  I had one player reach out to me saying that they showed their mum their kitchen with the rice cooker in it, and they finally understood why the daughter enjoyed playing The Sims and what the game was about because they finally saw themselves represented in the game. Hearing stories like that and being able to bring those moments to players is one of the most exciting things we can do as game developers. 

“I want to know what's in the mystery tent!”

•  Player @Chatasso_o 

SimGuruRhys: The mystery tent has been in the game since around in 2014 and once you complete the ‘Life Dreams and Legacies’ quest you will have the ability to unlock the carnival on the Mysterious Island. In the carnival, there’s a tent – and if you click on it, you’ll see a message that says “It's too dark to see inside, I wonder what it could be?” I have no idea! 

SimGuruMegz: We were surprised that there were SO many questions about this, what would YOU like to see so maybe we can bring them to life! I think we’re asking for trouble by even putting a message on their, instead of doing nothing we’re inviting curiosity! I have creepy clown nightmares. 

SimGuruRhys: No but seriously, what was planned for the tent originally was part of a scavenger hunt quest, which would have seen your Sims go over all the various maps and finding clues and leading your way back to the tent. There was a dance floor inside with various characters in the game! Due to various technical problems, usability and playability issues with the quest it ended up being cut.

SimGuruMegz: I did not know that, at all! That’s such a huge nugget you’ve just dropped then, for sure! Why cant we bring it back?

SimGuruRhys: We’ve actually used a some of the assets in different ways now, but [now we know there's a bit of a demand for it], we could potentially bring it back down the track. 

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Thank you to our incredible EA Creators and player community for their questions to make this video possible. We’re so proud to work on such a special Sims experience on mobile that empowers you to expand your world and discover different sides of you! Your creations constantly inspire us to improve our game with every update. 

For more details on all the features and content we’ve been talking about today, visit our official website News page section and our YouTube channel for videos and trailers to get inspired! 

Jump into FreePlay to discover a new playstyle and be inspired to try a new YOU! Available on iOS, Android and Amazon devices.