We start designing the aspiration system from halves, which eventually become our core gameplay of the game. During the scriptwriting, we make sure it is more Sims-like and tried our best to bring in the elements of the original game. We used the SFX from the original game and tried to match the scene with the sounds. Thanks to the well-designed SFX from The Sims 4, there are a lot of iconic SFX that original The Sims players can resonate with the moments when hearing them. Besides, there are also many playful moments that we can add surprises to the sound effect. Since the players are not able to see as many visuals as the original game, we can use sound effects to create more imaginations for the player by applying filters and direction mixer.

In our game, we designed several fun moments for the player to explore. For example, if you let your Sim sing in the party, you might hear him/her singing out of tune. You could also train your Sim from a poor violin player to a better violinist. These are the sounds that are positive and make people smile.

Simlish

In addition, Simlish is not understandable for everyone, but the emotion in the voice acting can create a great scenario. It’s even more direct than a dialog. During the design of the sound effects, we want to create the same scenario, so most of the time we’ll set up the same scene in the game and record the sound from the position where we placed the camera. It’s very similar to the real world video shooting. The ambience sound also plays an important role in our game. Originally we were using the raw clips from the database,  but we think it’s missing something. Due to the technical limitation, we can’t overlay the sound clips in realtime. So we have to handle the mixing before sending it to the game. Most of the time we’ll set up a virtual studio in The Sims game and do visuals and sound effects on it. There are some sample SFX we would like to show.