The Sims team has released the sixth part of their “Create a Stuff Pack” campaign. In this round you will vote on potential titles for this pack. Click here to vote.
Introducing… The Sims 4 Laundry Day Stuff! Just last week, you helped select an official name and today, you’re invited to participate in the final vote we’ll be holding for this pack. That said, it certainly isn’t the last opportunity to influence what gets created. We’re right in the middle of production, and things are progressing rapidly. Development updates are being shared on my twitter, @SimGuruGraham, and on our dedicated section of the official forums, SimGuruGraham’s Corner.
Now is the time to share your thoughts on the progress you see, and to speak up with your feedback.
Selecting an icon for a pack is a process that starts similarly to how we choose a name. Production and marketing share ideas back and forth, only this time with clip art examples to get the ball rolling. Once we have suggestions on what could visually represent the pack, we hand those ideas off to a brand design agency who takes each idea and develops it into an icon for consideration.
This agency has helped define the identity of The Sims 4 packaging that you see on store shelves – going all the way back to base game. We continue to partner with them to assist in developing the branding for each pack that’s released. Sometimes an icon immediately stands out among the group as the obvious choice. Other times we narrow the selections down, and ask for some further revisions on the ideas that we think show promise.
Today, your vote will assist in the final steps of this process. We’ve worked with our partners to create four distinct icons that could represent this pack. Please choose your favorite!
Voting ends on September 15th, 2017 at 10AM PT.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/IconVoteIf you’ve been following Stuff Packs, then the image shared below should be immediately recognizable from The Sims 4 Backyard Stuff. You can see we explored a number of other ideas that didn’t get used. We felt like the picket fence was a pretty iconic (forgive the pun) visual that people commonly associate with fencing in a yard, but it didn’t say anything about the new gameplay. We toyed with the idea of incorporating the pack’s main gameplay object in the icon, and tried to explore iconography for a lawn water slide. Attempting to fit such a long, narrow object in a small icon proved to be a challenge. In the end, we settled on the simple visual of a glass of lemonade. It represented the new drink pitcher that was included in the pack, as well as capturing the casual “backyard feel” the pack was aiming for.
As development on The Sims 4 Laundry Day Stuff proceeds, we’re seeing more gameplay take shape. Once we entered production, the next major date in our development schedule is set for October 6th, which is our Alpha submission milestone. An alpha milestone is defined as the pack being “feature complete” (a.k.a. every piece of functionality detailed in the design has been implemented in-game).
To help us move forward, the first thing we did was get an initial gameplay prototype running within a week of entering production. This allowed us to see Sims generating piles of clothes when changing outfits, and then being able to take those clothes to a hamper, from a hamper to a washer, and from a washer to the dryer in-game. Essentially, we can complete a full gameplay loop, and start to get a sense for how the features will play in-game. Although that core functionality in place, there’s still a whole lot of work left to implement to fully realize the entire laundry system.
While today’s icon vote is the final survey we’ll hold for The Sims 4 Laundry Day Stuff, please continue to share your feedback on our development updates. Your comments will influence the decisions we make, as we still have lots of work left to do on this pack. The best place to share your thoughts and to ask questions continues to be in SimGuruGraham’s Corner, the section of our official forums that’s dedicated to this project.
