Sul Sul Simmers. The Sims Team wants you to pick your favorite Art Style for Echo Living.
Last week, we announced a brand new project where those of us here at Maxis will work hand in hand with all of you in the community to create a new Stuff Pack that represents players’ desires. After counting votes from Sims players across the world, you’ve selected “eco living” as the theme for the upcoming Stuff Pack that we’ll be developing together. Today we start the next major step in development, as we’re asking you to help select this pack’s art style.
If you’re just discovering this project today, then welcome! There are many decisions still to be made where your input will help shape what we create. What you’ll see in the survey below is what we call a “pack brief.” It starts with our Art Director, who gathers reference images and works with our concept artists to sketch the rough “room views” that you’ll see. These room views represent a slice of the furniture, décor, and clothing we hope to offer within this pack. It’s important that we select an art style before we task our concept artists with creating a full set of content. On a typical Stuff Pack, the Art Director would meet with Producers and Designers and we’d come to a decision as a group regarding the art style we want to move forward with. But as with everything on this project, we want your choices to guide us forward.
After we gather the results of this art style vote, our concept artists will start to draw a variety of objects and clothing that fit the art style that you’ve selected. The Objects & Clothing Vote, which starts May 19th, is where you’ll see the result of our concept artist’s work, and you’ll choose your favourite objects and pieces of clothing that will be included in this Stuff Pack. As a reminder, here’s the full schedule of upcoming votes. Come back on these dates and make your voice heard!
• Art Style Vote (April 11th – April 13th): Select between proposed art styles for the pack, which will guide our concept artists in the objects and clothing they create.
• Objects & Clothing Vote (May 19th – May 22nd): 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 24th – June 27th): Select the top gameplay feature(s) you want to have included in the pack.
• Pack Icon Vote (Spring): 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 (Spring): Select a title that best summarizes the pack’s atmosphere and content.
In between votes, you’re invited to engage in discussion and respectful debate in SimGuruGraham’s Corner on our official forums. Here you can chat with fellow players, ask questions to the dev team, and discover behind the scenes information regarding the pack’s progress from the developers.
