Glamour - Behind the Scenes
Get a behind the scenes look at the making of Glamour Life Stuff
Glamour Life Stuff - Behind the Scenes
The Sims 2 team lets you in on some of the behind-the-scenes secrets to stuff that you see in the game everyday! We chatted with one of our game producers, Lyndsay Pearson (MaxisLittleL) to give you a sneak peek into the making of Glamour Life Stuff!
Lyndsay: Hello everybody! It's Lyndsay again and I wanted to give you a little more background on the new Glamour Life Stuff Pack coming out later this month.
Early sketch of bedroom set
How do you start? How do you come up with ideas for the things you make?
Lyndsay: You may be surprised to find out that one of the first things we look at is you. We read the boards, we see customer survey reports, we take polls, we look at the kind of content you're creating for yourselves and we think about how to give you the things you commonly ask for. One of the biggest problems we initially had was "What is Glamour?" Glamour can mean so many things to different people that it was hard to find a definition we all agreed on. We started with sketches we call "high level concept art" to give us a "feel" of the kinds of things we could make that would be "glamourous".
Where does your inspiration come from?
Lyndsay: When I asked our lead concept artist, Jeff Adams, about how he approached some of the initial concepts, he said "The Glamour Life process was unique in that I not only thought of objects, but of the personalities that lived within the environments those objects decorated. [I originally thought about] the rocker, the actress, the old money sim, the R&B star, and the executive (which won). This helped because it kept me from trying to be broad in the scope of the designs, and allowed me to focus in on furniture and decorations that the world traveling executive would have in his/her home.
Sample skin detail
To summarize, it wasn't a particular design style that was the driving force, but rather one personality's sense of taste".
After nailing a feel, we started looking at magazines, searching for images online as our concept artists continued iterating on the looks we'd liked, eventually all adding up to a coherent style we could rally around.
Sample dresser model
Sample glamour bedroom design mode/DM
From that point, we started to focus on which objects we really liked, which ones needed to be modified slightly or which ones we needed to change completely. We came up with a list of all the objects and skins we thought would flesh out a stuff pack and started creating more detailed outlines of them.
Wow, those concept sketches are cool! What happens next?
Lyndsay: We review all of these designs and then wait anxiously to see how they look when they return from our very talented artists. We put them into the game, build out rooms and test design modes then tweak and polish them until they're just right. Then all of the pretty, polished work gets put into tantalizing screenshots for your enjoyment!
That's it! A small taste of some of the pre-production work we do to get wonderful objects and games into your hands.