Role: Lead Designer

Engine: Maxis Engine

Studio: Maxis

Team Size: 100+

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When Visceral shut down I was given an opportunity to move one floor down and work on the Sims.  With two kids in EA Daycare and a pregnant wife, it was a good move for me to try something different and take care of my family for a bit.  The Sims was a great way for me to get exposure to:

 

• Deep community involvement with live service development

• Developing a game that supports modding

• Developing a game with deep player driven story telling

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My responsibilities were:

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• Led a cross disciplinary team to create a new type of career on the Fame expansion pack

• Developed and managed the Tropical Living expansion pack gameplay vision on a 30-person team

• Reviewed, approved and guided gameplay through the Sims production pipeline

• Worked with the community manager and Sims influencers to identify live service opportunities

• Identified workflow issues and worked with production, art and programming to resolve them

• Tuned and bug fixed an expansion pack through launch to learn about the Sims franchise

• Helped rebuild the Maxis design team

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The majority of my time on the Sims was spent proving that I could deliver quality in a genre type that I was unfamiliar with.  I did that by developing a new type of career, Acting, for the Fame expansion pack.  It involved making the mechanics of the career and the level design of all the spaces you could act in.  Scrub through the video below to see how the acting career plays out:

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