Post a Comment On: Digitally Staving Off Boredom

Since the last entry a couple days ago, my binging on The Sims 4 has been interrupted only by my personal game development endeavors' pomodoros.  I had some pretty good progress made there, but mostly in the brass tacks of programming, coding poorly deliberately in order to spur progress at all, and spending a lot of time correcting what I coded.

After taking some time pondering what might make for an interesting Sims 4 story to tell, I created a character named Trip Delvin (genius, noncommital, a loner - my Gary Stu all the way) who was intended to be an international man of mystery who traveled the world as an investigative journalist.  This is because he was going to do all of the content in all of the DLC, and it was a pretty good excuse to get a self-insert character all up in everyone's business. 
[Image] A lovely new layer of snow covers the ground outside of Trip's apartment.  His inventory overflows with Jungle Adventure junk, and he's rolling in simoleons from hawking the exceptionally expensive ones at 200% markup. I decided that Trip's first goal was to explore the Sims 4 Jungle Adventure expansion.  It was a pretty good one, very much my cup of tea (at least through the Sims 4 aperture).  The jungle had a great ambiance, the locals were suitably South American, and the activities balanced interesting loot to collect with an element of danger (right down to the killer bees attacking out of the blue). 

Somewhere at EA, there was a team of Sims 4 developers who were pleased as punch to be allowed to actually make a procedural dungeon generator using the parts in the game.  The variety and depth of the random jungle temple interiors turned out great, which goes to show EA is wasting the talents of some of the brightest minds in the industry by making them focus more on casual accessibility.
[Image] Anyone who finds this room will know Trip was doing some pretty serious shit. After raiding many such temples and cursing a few of the natives for science, I finally completed the Jungle Explorer aspiration yesterday afternoon.  I ended up cashing in most of the satisfaction points  he earned for the Savant trait, a handy trait that boosts the speed of learning skills.  There were monetary benefits as well, his maxed out archeological skill is easily one of the biggest moneymakers in the game, but I was raking in tons of simoleons from selling golden frogs I recovered from temples (worth over 8,000) for three times that via markups in yard sales.

[Image] Put on a few pounds?  Me too, buddy. In terms of Trip's ongoing story, I took the "international man of mystery" thing a little too seriously and now I'm stuck on the secret agent career path, much to Trip's noncommital dismay.  After finishing the Jungle Adventure aspiration, he's moved to Strangerville to tackle that adventure next.  He is not good enough at writing to be a journalist, but I put a lot of effort into adding a secret agent lair behind a hidden bookcase in the basement, and he's using his world-famous archeologist identity as a cover.  It was not what I intended, but a pretty good story nevertheless.

Apparently, spending a lot of time about the house while eating street food is bad for Trip's waistline.  Are you trying to tell me something, EA?  He's getting rather fat, and bearing an uncanny resemblance to the dumpy-looking hero of the first Orcs Must Die game.  I need to get him some exercise, but there's no gym in Strangerville, he's out of room to install an exercise device, his loner ways might make him uncomfortable with jogging around town, and I can't reconcile the idea he commutes far for his cardio.

Yesterday, I bought four more DLC: Get Together, Vampires, Vintage Glamor Stuff, and Cool Kitchen Stuff.  The 20th-anniversary sale ended yesterday, but the Build Your Bundle deal is about as cheap.  At about 4 AAA box prices dumped on the DLC over the past couple weeks, I think I might have a problem. [Image] There went much of my tax rebate this year. In terms of how I feel about moving Trip's story forward, I can't help but think that it might be a bit more interesting if I had multiple sims with more diverse skillsets by setting arbitrary learning barriers on what each sim is good at.  But surrounding this idea with a good story trapping will be necessary to elevate it above merely power gaming The Sims 4.  
I should probably just stick with Trip and grow this household in a way that supports the ongoing story.  But, suffice it to say, there's a reason I gave him the noncommital trait: it wasn't his problem, it was mine.