As the September release date for The Sims 2 nears, the developers at Maxis are busy putting the finishing touches on what is undoubtedly one of the biggest game releases of the year. In The Sims 2, you'll once again have the opportunity to create your own sims, or virtual people, and manipulate their lives. However, the gameplay has been deepened, so you will also have to take into account your sims' desires and fears. Sims will want riches, fame, family, and more, and it'll be up to you to decide whether or not to give it to them. Your sims will also marry, have children, grow old, and eventually die, but you can still carry on playing the game with their children. In this edition of our designer diaries, Maxis vice president Lucy Bradshaw explains what the development team has been working on, and she also gives us an introduction to some of the unique families that will ship with the game.

The Sticky Wall at Maxis.

Crunch Time

Here we are at the final phase of development on The Sims 2. Just to give you a sense of what things are like around the office these days, let me paint the picture. It is Tuesday at 1:30am. I just had a meeting with about six members of the team to review how we are tuning the popularity aspiration in the game. Yup, we are in crunch mode. We have a wall here at the office called the "Sticky Wall"--basically a huge wall with a high-level snapshot of the schedule reflecting the last four months of the project (the entire project would take a much bigger wall), completely covered with Post-it Notes. Each Post-it Note represents a specific high-level task that we need to complete. It is a very tall and very long wall. Each time we complete one of the tasks, we stamp a big "DONE" stamp on its Post-it Note. Well, I am very happy to say that we are awash with "DONE"-stamped Post-its!!!! Ah, but we are not done yet...

We are at that point where we are hammering away at bugs and tuning, tuning, tuning. Truth be told, it is a blast. It's like rounding that final curve and all of your adrenaline is pumping. Each day the gameplay gets tighter as we tune. We're also getting a lot of quality time with our teammates; this is a time we like to call "crunch time." One thing that keeps us laughing as we work is our group of favorite bugs. (Oops, that is a sneak preview of what I'll be writing about next month!)

Another thing we go into overdrive on, at this point, is getting play feedback. Throughout the course of development, we pull together play groups and what we call "Kleenex- testing" groups. (Kleenex tests are where we have first-time users play the game. The deal is, once we have "used" this player, that's it. We can't get first impressions again, so they are used up). We check on how well the user interface is delivering and if players are getting the key concepts of the gameplay. One thing that came clear through these tests is that The Sims 2 is an enormous game. It occurred to us, in such an open-ended game, it might be cool if we expose some of the possibilities in store for your sims by setting the stage, so to speak. So we've been having some fun with our own game.

Strangetown is one of the three neighborhoods that will ship in the game, and it is the home of lots of weird occurrences.

When you enter The Sims 2, you can either choose from one of three neighborhoods that will ship with the game or you can create your own. You can create your own family in any of the shipping neighborhoods, or you can play as one of the existing families that we have created, just to get a sense of what can happen. Each family is very unique. One neighborhood that I like is Strangetown--this is where we decided to put all of our very "out there" sims. And the really fun thing is that you can set up relationships across families. Sims are more aware of their relationships than ever before, so the goings-on in the 'hood can get pretty funny.