Dev Blog week 13: Daily Routine Restructured & Musical Genius Finished

Dev Blog Week 13

Completed Aspiration: Musical Genius

This week our most effort is put on the Musical Genius Aspiration. We created the scenes in The Sims when writing the script, and built our Plumbob Town, where players could shop in a musical instrument store, rehearse in Kevin’s luxury apartment, or even perform at a famous music festival! Besides the visual part, we also had the sound effect ready for this aspiration. Moreover, if the player completes the first event of Musical Genius and picks one musical instrument, then the option of practicing that instrument will be unlocked in daily routine. And of course, the higher musical skill a sim has, the better sound he/she could make through practicing.

Amazon Certification

This week we submitted our skill for certification from Amazon. The whole process includes privacy policy checks, functional tests, and other requirements stuff. Three days after submission we got the feedback saying that our description for the skill needs to be more detailed. We then reiterated on the description and re-submitted our updated version.

Daily Routine Restructured

Since the past two weeks, we have all been focusing on the content of aspiration, it’s time for us to review the daily routine part. Aside from the added practice instrument interactions that we mentioned above, we also made some experimental changes to the eating part. We replaced the old choices with “Quick Meal”, “Cook Something” and “Order Delivery”. The first two choices will then pick three options from our “recipe pool” for the player to choose from. We did this change in order to avoid players from getting bored with the same options every time in daily routine.

Feedback from clients and faculty about the daily routine

We demoed our new daily routine system during the client meeting and gathered some valuable feedback which can be helpful for further iterations.

Right now to have a certain meal, players need to go through three nodes, 2 may be a good number.
The transition indicating your sim is at home is not clear.
For visuals, it’s better that each interaction has its own visual (image).
We could consider directly picking one from the pool after “Quick Meal” and “Cook Something”, so that balance between time and random surprise can be achieved.