
The Sims Game Design Documents (1997) - doppp
http://donhopkins.com/home/TheSimsDesignDocuments/
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OtterCoder
MaxisSimRules.pdf is a gold mine of distilled wisdom all by itself.

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kakarot
Thanks for the heads up. You're right.

There are gems like,

"Players occasionally need to abandon long term strategy in favor of short-
term success."

and

"Because of the interleaving data sets in the simulators, players may not
initially understand why certain actions have unexpected effects. One of the
compelling reasons to play is to discover and understand various causes and
effects."

Good advice for any game designer.

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elcapitan
> "Players occasionally need to abandon long term strategy in favor of short-
> term success."

That reminds me in a way of this article:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/28/opinion/28radosh.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/28/opinion/28radosh.html)

"Like cinema, games will need to embrace the dynamics of failure, tragedy,
comedy and romance. They will need to stop pandering to the player’s desire
for mastery in favor of enhancing the player’s emotional and intellectual
life."

It's true, games often cater to this expectation of gradual, linear
improvement without major setbacks. One thing that is nice about the Sims is
that it allows for a longer developing series of ups and downs. It's kind of
like feature movies (linear games) vs the more recent TV series in that
regard.

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sololipsist
I don't like the way it's phrased like an exclusive dichotomy, and that games
must stop "pandering" to mastery to "embrace" intellectual life. This reads
like someone who just likes film but doesn't like videos games turning their
nose up at something they view as aesthetically inferior, as if their shitty
aesthetic opinions are informed by universal objective truth itself.

Yeah, absolutely, video games that enhance the emotional and intellectual
lives of the audience are better for it, but games that give the audience a
sense of accomplishment and reward curiosity are _also_ better for it. There
is no reason to stop doing one to do the other. Video games don't need to be
movies.

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elcapitan
Wow, this is super cool. I wish there were repositories of older, well known
games and their design documents.

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fancy_pantser
There was a site, gamepitches.com, that wanted to archive these types of
documents but it only existed for a few years. Here's a Wayback Machine link
to the document archive:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20150406082704/http://www.gamepi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150406082704/http://www.gamepitches.com/game-
designs/)

Some classic design documentation is available for Karateka and Prince of
Persia by the creator:
[http://www.jordanmechner.com/backstage/journals/](http://www.jordanmechner.com/backstage/journals/)

Gamasutra postmortems are a good resource for modern games. They don't usually
have design documents but they often talk about their plans and how they had
to change during development:
[http://www.gamasutra.com/features/postmortem/](http://www.gamasutra.com/features/postmortem/)

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jameskegel
Wow that's a valuable resource; were you the author?

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fancy_pantser
Sorry, no. I believe it was Gabriel Pendleton (@GabeTHEGeek).

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frik
Was on HN yesterday, see also for insightful comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14997725](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14997725)

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synthmeat
These PDFs, as contrasted by the brevity of the Motive.c, is story greater
than the sum of its parts.

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Dowwie
Don is an active member of the HN community.

Hi, Don!

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qatanah
Interesting enough they considered implementing feng shui in
Ch09-Architecture.pdf.

Feng Shui Analysis TBD.

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DonHopkins
Effectively, the Sims themselves are the Feng Shui analyzers, in the way that
the layout and open spaces of their house and the objects in it affects the
routing efficiency and creates flows and bottlenecks, which affects how much
time they have for other more productive uses of time than walking across the
house to the bathroom, queuing to walk through doors, navigating through
crowds, which indirectly affects their overall happiness and other motives
scores.

To show how happy your Sims are, the antlers of the Beaver Pelt Moosehead
occasionally moves up and down to reflect the overall happiness of the family
members!

[http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Beaver_Pelt_Moosehead](http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Beaver_Pelt_Moosehead)

If your Sims get really depressed, and have a Tragic Clown Painting on the
wall, a real Tragic Clown arrives and performs annoying tricks that make you
even more depressed, and he is very difficult to get rid of.

[http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Tragic_Clown](http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/Tragic_Clown)

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zamber
Awesome. Finally I know how to summon Satan (TheSimsPieMenus.pdf)!

