Yes I've been pondering it, I'm extremely surprised that no other studios have made an earnest go at it. The attempts I have seen have just been the usual game studio trash where they went woke and clearly had the typical DLC/microtransactions planned for monetisation. It's ridiculous how much of a stranglehold the woke ideology has now on game developers and it's like no game in the west can release without some DEI bullshit.
I would even be tempted to make it pretty low poly for the sake of making it run well, just have good animations and style then pour the rest of my time into the code. The temptation of being able to directly piss into EA's cornflakes is far too great for me.
I mean if you can, you can steal that women's gaming from EA since women REALLY love playing The Sims
Men, it's more Simcity and we have Skylines for that.
dwarf fortress
hahah yes lol Sims games are definitely more on the casual side and I freely admit I enjoy casual gameplay quite a bit if it runs well
I like making and designing the houses.
Sims is my guilty pleasure as well.
Rimworld
Love me some RimWorld.
Getting back into that is near the top of my gaming list.
Yep, Rimworld, although that game has furries :(
That you can genocide
True lol
They make the best cowboy hats.
Why do you think they call it Rimworld?
The only ones I know of are Paralives and inZOI
The one you will most likely be competing with is Paralives which has been in development since about 2019 and if their modding tools and the base system is any good it will probably take over the market.
InZOI looks like unoptimised unreal engine, with some weird idea to mix cutscences into the gameplay (and cutscences in which they are not even in the same environment as the action) very weird design choice.
My recommendation with you current proven skillset is not to head into this niche.
It cracks me up when you can guess tags based on artstyle.
I have a very high rate of success guessing if a game has the "LGBTQ+" tag.
It's a shame; the first screenshot looks nice, actually, but once you see the characters closer up, it gets horrendous fast. Which is a shame, it looks like they have some cool features and passion for the project. But the artstyle is, in my opinion, total ass.
LGBTQ+ is one of the only tags I have blocked on my Steam discovery queue.
Same here.
I would much rather see some clean low poly art these days and games developers almost never do that because they think that they have to compete with AAA studios in terms of graphical fidelity. They don't seem to understand how much of a difference the polygon count makes to game stability.
hey, you could always go back a few years and play fnaf for the billionth time...
Paralives looks woke.
Well I'm very much focused right now on getting By the gods out the door which I'm painfully close to. I have this feeling because game studios are greedy fucks and can't help themselves that those two titles are going to rip gamers off with their business practices. I'm just having a bit of a think because I am fully intent on doing this professionally, while I work on updates for By the gods and get that sorted I want to have something extra to play around with which will be a bit of a relief compared to look at the same code every day.
It's just something to think about, I'm putting out feelers, really the hardest thing for an indie dev is to simply get people to look at stuff and give real feedback on things. By the way, depending on the game scale simulation games aren't that difficult to pull off once you get the basic framework in. I've been working very hard in the background on putting together my own asset library which means I should be able to pump stuff out a lot faster soon enough.
well, If you ever need ideas, I've absolutely no skills and a handful of game ideas that've been floating around int he back of me head for years, lol.
as for a break on looking at the same code, why not crank out some shitposty game that doesn't need to look as good for a laugh?
lol I've got plenty of ideas don't worry, some of them even good and I'm making it something of a mission to do games low poly generally just because I'm fed up of games that endlessly run like shit. Yeah, I don't know, I'm pondering it, another idea I've had is cranking out some kind of simple FPS, the problem with an FPS though is everybody does them now so I'm pondering it still.
I'm just gonna throw this out there, because the idea grabbed a hold of me, dumb as it is, but have ever you given any thought to a spiritual successor to boogerman?
...yeah, I know I'm retardedđŸ˜‘
lol no
fair, lol.
honestly, the game kinda sucks, but the gimmick is fun. I'm just in a very immature mental state right now, apparently.
Almost any studio doing something like this is going to have all the gay race communism shit because it's just easier to develop a game that lacks meaningful sex/race differences.
If you program it in, then people are going to wonder where that comes from. Like are you one of those bigots who thinks men and women are different and have different abilities and preferences? Way easier to avoid that controversy just by saying, "Whatever, anything goes."
Fake Controversy = Free Advertisement
Sure except facing a hostile press with a unified ideology that is largely shared by a brainwashed public isn't a recipe for success.
I'm not saying you can't win, you can, but the conditions are not at all favorable. And the best you get out of it is more exposure -- Your game still has to be really good to be successful.
That's a lot of gambling to be doing when you are a small game developer / studio. Not surprising few want to take it.
I know this is coming across weirdly optimistic, but I don't think that games journalists have the same kind of clout as they once did and pull when it comes to cancelling developers they don't like. The outrage mobs are more politically focused these days and seem to have largely given up on games. Oh they'll still fucking try, don't get me wrong, but they don't have the level of reach they used to have and I have to wonder if that's in part due to them devoting so many resources to the American elections. Even taking that into account though the normies simply aren't buying what they're selling much like with Hollywood.
Rimworld lol.
If you don't want to give money to people who hate you, option to torrent The Sims 3 and be as based as you want with an Aryan family making a bunch of kids.
I suggest trying without the DLCs since they take a comically large amount of disk space.
That's exactly something I never liked about The Sims 3 and it's not just the disk space it was a horribly optimised game that takes forever to load and I have a pretty respectable mid range PC even for these days. Funny thing is it looks like even with The Sims 2 this was an issue and the game just didn't run terribly well. You can do much better with a solidly built modern engine these days.
How badly they optimized The Sims 3 : loading times didn't improve by any notable margin from an old shitty computer to a recent one.
Did they just put a fucking timer on load pages? Once you're in the game, it's fine though.
Haven't played in a long while.
Nah, there was always something funky about The Sims 3, I researched it when I was younger, that's how long the issues have been around. For example the sims NPCs wouldn't delete themselves properly once they exited out of bounds which is why the game would drop in FPS so much among other things. It was generally a very poorly coded game despite the gameplay being relatively top tier for it's time.
Making a sims clone is a daunting technical and content creation challenge. There's tens of thousands of items in the sims and every person who tries your game is going to ask why you don't have one of them.
No one will want to play "the sims with less features", so you'd need to design a new compelling gameplay element that can't be done in the sims and do it well.
If you had asked me 5 years ago I'd be in complete agreement and wouldn't even think of looking at it, but with modern game engines you would be surprised at how it's not necessarily 'easier' I suppose to churn out these kinds of projects but it's certainly a lot less painful. Don't be fooled by the customisation options of AAA studios, most of them are just a variety of repeating texture patterns among other things. This is why I often snub any game where I see a huge amount of customisation in it because it tells me they spent more on that than the game itself.
People are rightly pointing out Rimworld and it is a great example, it doesn't have as much customisation but that's because it focused far more on the gameplay as any game should.
I forget what game it was, but somebody sold me a ps3 with it on, and for once in my life I actually bothered to customize the character.
by the time i was done, I was so sick of the game, I never actually bothered to play it...