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The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry

Session Name: Modeling Individual Personalities in The Sims 3
Speaker(s): Richard Evans
Company Name(s): Little Text People
Track / Format: Programming

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Overview: One of our design goals in The Sims 3 was to make each Sim have her own individual personality which was clearly manifest in autonomous behavior. This talk will show how we created these individual personalities. I will show live demos of the in-game visualization tools we used for testing and refining their behavior.

I will also show how our fine-grained socializing model allowed us to manifest fine-grained personalities. Because the social system was fully data-driven, non-technical producers and designers were able to specify hundreds of interactions, and thousands of production-rules. Here is one way of answering Chris Hecker's notorious photoshop challenge: to allow content authors to define flexible behavior.

GDC 2010

Richard Evans

Little Text People

free content

Programming

Programming