Developer Chats — SimCity eGuide

Massive Multi-City Scale

Kip Katsarelis, Lead Producer

Hello everyone, I’m Kip Katsarelis, Lead Producer on SimCity . I’d like to let you know about multi-city play and why this feature takes city building to all new heights. Cities in the real world work together; larger cities support smaller surrounding cities by providing jobs, fire services, police services, education, and more. Cities everywhere in the world behave like this and we wanted to bring this experience into the new SimCity .

Laying the Foundation

To fully understand the power of multi-city play, you must first understand the possibilities of what you can create in a single city. There is no single path for a given city—no rail or guide to follow. There are a number of factors and choices available to players as they set out to create their cities. Let’s start with the choice on where to build your city. You’ll have several Region Map options to choose from. Some may only have two city slots available to them and some can have as many as sixteen, and everything in between. The city location you choose can have a number of terrain formations and resources available to choose from. There are mountainous city locations rich with resources, like coal, ore, and oil. There are ones filled with water or wind. Others have many access points like rivers, bays, rails that run through, or large highways that connect them to the region. The conditions in each starting location will heavily influence the shape of your city, by supporting some industries to thrive and setting others to be less successful. We wanted to make sure there were plenty of options and a broad landscape for fans to be inspired by and create.

In this SimCity we’ve introduced city specializations into the game, which take advantage of the natural resources and landscape of the region. These city specializations include casinos, mining, electronics, and trading. There are sub-categories for cities to specialize in as well, like power city, water city, garbage city, public services, and more. Cities may choose to focus entirely on residential, commercial businesses, or industrial. Within in each of the RCI types, each have their own wealth or tech types, which offers more directions to push your cities. When you start to think about all of these possibilities, plus all of the combinations, you start to realize the scope of gameplay a single city has to offer. I find new city combinations every day; the depth of the game continues to blow my mind.

City Synergy

Now that you have an idea of what a single city has to offer, let’s talk about how these cities can work together and how these city specializations rely on one another to be successful. We had a few key design goals in mind when we set out to work on the multi-city play. We wanted to really push the amount of simulation that carries over across cities to epic proportions. The key goal is to give players control over what is shared, and making sure the experience holds up if it’s one player playing multiple cities or multiple people playing multiple cities.

With the core RCI we share workers, jobs, shoppers, orders, freight, and students. These are “traded” automatically to take away some of the micromanagement. Workers will look within your city for jobs. If you have an excess of workers, these become unemployed Sims. If you are connected to a city that has excess jobs, then unemployed Sims from one city will commute to the neighboring city. The city with jobs receiving the workers will satisfy the needs of their shops and industries. The city with the residents will make its population happy, because they have money to pay their rent. It’s a win-win. Workers will commute by car, but you can also set up bus routes, train connections, and ferry connections between cities. It’s important that you are connected by road, rail, or water to trade with a neighboring city.

All of the core systems are shared, including fire service, crime, police coverage, medical coverage, garbage/recycling, classrooms, all public transportation, air pollution, water, power, sewage, and sewage treatment. Players have more direct control over where they send their services. We designed this system from the point of view of the player who is investing in a particular type of city. For example, if one player decides to build Fire Stations to protect not only that city, but the city’s neighbors as well, the player should have the right to decide where to send the coverage. In the case of fire, a player can assign individual fire trucks and helicopters to serve specific cities. Just because a player assigns a vehicle to serve another city doesn’t mean the player loses coverage in his or her own. This is asynchronous gameplay, so one fire engine can service both cities. The player receiving coverage will see fire engines come from a neighbor whenever there is a fire in the city. The player giving the coverage will earn money for each fire the fire engine puts out. Systems that have capacity, like a police station, will bring criminals back to house them in jail cells. If those jail cells are full, the criminals will be released into your city, which is an unexpected way to share criminals. The simulation extends beyond your city borders. Are you starting to get it?

Building and Sharing

Let me continue with how resource sharing works. Cities can gift one another coal, ore, oil, alloy, metal, fuel, plastics, processors, TVs, and Simoleons! This ability for cities to create a service and provide a role in the greater region adds a whole new micro-strategy to SimCity . To gift resources to another city you must have the resource in your city to gift. In the case of coal, this could be in your coal mine storage lot or in a Trade Depot storage lot. Resources and materials can be sent by truck, rail, or boat. The more options both cities have, the greater the throughput. Resources do take time to send and players can queue up orders, which are sent over time. Players will be able to create port cities, establishing supply chains across the region, adding a completely new dimension to SimCity .

In addition to regional trading, we also wanted to give players new ways to play, and reasons why to create and push cities into different directions. Players will be presented with a variety of goals, which they can choose to opt into or not. These goals will require an entire region of cities to work together to complete. These include Global Challenges, like the “Lockdown!” challenge, where they to need arrest the most criminals possible in a specific amount of time. The top 10% of regions who successfully complete the challenge will earn an achievement. Leaderboards are another big motivator for me right now when I play the game. Each city specialization has its own leaderboard—the extraction-type leaderboards (coal, ore, and oil) seem to always suck me in. I’m always looking at who in the studio is at the top of the oil leaderboards and try to top them. We also have regional leaderboards for things like Highest Population or Most Simoleons. Here players are ranked on the total region’s score and compete against other mayors and regions.

Great Works and Beyond

Great Works are the crowning achievement for any region, a major late-game reward. These are large collaborative civil engineering projects that multiple cities can work together to complete. In turn, they give a benefit to the cities connected to it. These include things like the Solar Farm that produces enough power to sustain a group of cities. It will also create jobs, which gives an economic boost to any city. We’ve left it wide open, and know players will come up with their own goals for how they want to play.

The depth and scale of what we’ve delivered for this SimCity will amaze you. It amazes me! To think that all of the simulation you see inside your city works beyond the boundaries of your city, that your city and your actions influence and affect your neighbors. There are goals larger than simply building a single city and there are endless ways to build a city. The sandbox just got a little bigger. I hope you enjoyed this deeper dive into multi-city play.

Road to SimCity Success

Chris Schmidt, Tuning Designer

Hey everyone! My name is Chris Schmidt and I am a Tuning Designer here at Maxis. I work closely with the Scripting and QA teams to refine and improve SimCity by tweaking the gameplay and smoothing out the rough edges as we implement new systems. Additionally, I adjust the game balance in response to feedback, observation, and telemetry to try and maintain a good pace and feel to the experience as it comes to life.

I am here to talk about roads, zones, and density. We have ditched the grid in favor of our new agent-based system powered by the GlassBox Engine that allows us to take a more “ground up,” road-centric approach.

To better get acquainted with how this works, let me first explain how roads affect density. With the new road-centric approach, players can get the same functionality they used to get by zoning by density, but instead of using different zone densities, we limit density by road type. Zones and player-placed buildings can only be created on this existing infrastructure, since our new agent system uses the roads to bring power, water, sewage, and the agents themselves to and from your buildings.

As for the roads themselves, we have two size categories of road, each of which has their own upgrade path. We have the small roads (which can start out as dirt roads and move on up through four lane roads with traffic lights), and we have the large roads (which start out with boulevards and can be upgraded up to avenues with streetcar tracks like you’d see in real cities like San Francisco). The dirt roads and two lane roads are limited to the lowest density buildings, and each upgrade thereafter gets you to the next density type, whereas the large roads start out able to support up to medium density buildings, and can be upgraded to support the large high density buildings in one step.

In addition to allowing higher density buildings to be built, upgrading your roads will also improve your intersections, as higher tier roads will create stoplight intersections, and lower tier roads will generally have stop signs to regulate traffic. Upgrading your infrastructure can be expensive, but it’s important to keep your traffic flowing so your services can get where they’re needed.

Since we no longer have a grid to work from, it was important to us to make sure that traditional SimCity players still had the tools they needed to make the most efficient use of their space, whether it be using a grid or taking advantage of the new Curvy Road tool to work around some of the more challenging terrain features. As a result we have a new road guide that appears once you have placed your first road to show you the optimal distance from an existing road for you to build without wasting any of the space between. The road guides make it easy to build out a grid or to draw parallel curves, and its distance is calculated based on the depth away from the road that the buildings can grow. Since larger buildings have larger depths, and the roads themselves are two different sizes, the Large Road tool and the Small Road tool operate at different scales. But to make the grids work out as nicely as possible, we have made it so that four small roads made with the guides will line up nicely with three large roads. This means that your main street might have a little extra space behind it at first, but don’t worry, like those sweaters you’d get as a kid, your city will grow into it.

I hope this gives you a better sense of how much control you have over roads and density in SimCity . We’ve worked hard to make this system as friendly and intuitive as possible to both new players and city-building veterans. From making an optimized grid or concentric circles, to even guitar cities and M. C. Escher-esque configurations, we’ve had a blast coming up with new ways to lay out our cities, and I can’t wait to see what you guys come up with.

How I Mayor: Dirty Secrets of High Tech Industry

Brian Bartram, Senior Game Designer

Welcome, Mayors, to my high tech metropolis. Brian Bartram here, Senior Game Designer on SimCity , and I’ve been given the green light to show you how I built this city of the future. I’ve got a problem, though—investing deep in education has left my coffers nearly empty. But there’s a clever solution here, a pro tip that I’m going to share with you. Pay close attention, I’m going to make gold out of garbage!

Day One

When I founded Wintermute, I knew that I would need to plan ahead to create a high tech city. It took patience to build up a University to provide the strong education influence that I would need to convert dirty industry into clean (and profitable) high tech industry. But the result is worth it—I love the look of gleaming silver, clear blue, and bright yellow along with the interesting shapes and crazy structures of high tech industry.

Day Two

It’s no surprise that education doesn’t come cheap, and my investment in this University has left me nearly broke. Luckily, there’s a city specialization that fits my city perfectly—electronics manufacturing. The money is good, but the cost of raw materials is really cutting into my profits. Maybe there’s another way to look at this problem…

Day Three

While considering how to handle my city’s garbage problem, I noticed that recycling not only reduces garbage, but it also recovers alloy and plastic—which just happens to be the resources that I need to produce computer processors. Wait, this building will help me solve two problems at once? Gimme a loan, I need that Recycling Center right now!

Day Four

It didn’t take long to equip my new Recycling Center with modules to recover plastic and alloy for use in my electronics manufacturing city specialization I also make sure to provide my neighbors with recycling trucks to pick up their garbage—a win/win deal! I’m raking in so many resources that I’m able to stop importing them from the global market.

Day Five

It almost feels like cheating—collecting other people’s trash and turning it into the raw materials I need to make some of the most profitable goods available. But the results speak for themselves—my high tech city is clean, profitable, and full of smart, happy Sims. It was definitely a challenge, and required patience and planning. All the same, I’m delighted to show off my city to the other developers in the office, and a high tech city never fails to impress.

Working Up SimCity Wealth

Chris Schmidt, Tuning Designer

Hello again everyone! Previously, I talked to you about how roads affect density and how you get a city started in SimCity , so now I want to talk about how to make your city grow in wealth. Wealthy Sims bring with them high-rises and skyscrapers, as well as needs that others Sims will hardly complain about. Despite having a lower population density, these Sims are more demanding, and much harder to keep around. In the end, wealthy Sims can be a boon to your city, providing significantly more income than other Sims if managed well, or a burden if you aren’t up to the task.

In SimCity , you’ll find attracting high wealth Sims to your town and growing in wealth is fairly easy, however as I mentioned, the challenge comes in keeping wealthy Sims and businesses in your city. While all RCI buildings have basic needs, like water, power, sewage, and garbage, higher wealth Sims are more sensitive when their needs aren’t met and will become more vocal and less happy the more you ignore their needs. Education, pollution reduction, better crime suppression, and consistency in all your services will become a priority as your Sims go up in wealth. Additionally, each RCI category has a service that becomes more important the more buildings of that type you have. Industrial buildings are more prone to fires, commercial buildings are more sensitive to crimes, and residents will go home and stay there if they get sick, demanding more health services.

Based on what your focus is, you’ll want to make sure you have enough buildings to respond to their needs. Industrial cities will want to focus on fire and garbage services. Commercial cities will want to focus on police and transportation. Residential cities will want to focus on health and education. Individual services can cover a fair amount of your city, but unlike the suppression radius of previous SimCity games, these units have to actually travel to the problem areas, so you need to keep your streets clear with public transportation and make sure to expand your services to cover multiple fires, crimes, or injuries, particularly as these buildings grow in density. As you place service and infrastructure buildings to meet your city’s needs, you will see the land value of your city begin to change for better or worse, and in turn you will see some of your residential and commercial buildings upgrade to reflect these changes. Industrial buildings are less particular about where they like to be, and instead grow in tech level by having Community College or University education in the city. High tech buildings provide less air pollution, higher profit margins, and less of a negative impact on the land value of the neighborhoods that are nearby (though don’t expect anyone to build mansions nearby).

Controlling your land value to attract specific wealth classes is an important part of managing your city, and while getting medium wealth residential and commercial buildings is a natural part of improving conditions in your city, getting more than a handful takes some sprucing up. Players who decide they want to take on the challenges of higher wealth will mostly impact the wealth of their neighborhoods by improving them with parks. Parks come in a wide variety of flavors in SimCity , but can be generally broken into three categories: low wealth, medium wealth, and high wealth. Low wealth parks provide some happiness to the local Sims, and a place for Sims and their kids to hang out and keep out of trouble. Medium wealth parks attract medium wealth buildings, and are generally nature or sports themed. High wealth parks tend to revolve around sculptures and fountains and other expensive but nice to look at elements, and will attract high wealth buildings. Building parks in a neighborhood will spur the development of buildings of that wealth class in a radius around them, and building them in areas with a high natural land value, or overlapping the influence of another park will widen this effect. On the other hand buildings that are noisy, dangerous, or heavy polluters will decrease the land value around them, so be careful where you place them.

I hope this gives you a better sense of how you can attract and keep wealthy Sims and businesses in SimCity . The diversity and challenge of playing the wealth game means spinning a lot of plates, but I think you’ll be happy with the results if you take on the challenge!

How We Sim our Sims

Jeremy Dale, Animator

Hey everyone! I’m Jeremy Dale and I’m an Animator here at Maxis. It’s my job to make all the little Sims feel at home. Or at least act like they’re feeling at home. Or maybe if they don’t like their home, make them act like they don’t like their home. Okay, the important thing is I make sure that what the Sims are doing makes sense and is relevant.

There is a tremendous amount of data being transmitted under the hood with the GlassBox engine. My job is to put a human face on these transactions, and make them entertaining. From the lowly surveyors that you see preparing for construction, to the chaos of a foiled bank robbery shootout, I utilize our vignette system to expose the simulation to the player using Sims rather than pie charts.

As you may read in Engineer Robert Perry’s piece about physics, “what you see is what we Sim” is one of the core driving philosophies on SimCity . In my case, it’s more “when you see your Sims, you’re seeing your Sims’ simulation.” It’s not enough to make a city feel alive. It has to be alive. If you see a Sim wearing scrubs walking down the street, that’s not some random “extra,” that’s a nurse heading home from a shift at the hospital.

When Sims are at home, what do they do? What do Sims do when they’re shopping at a boutique? How can I best leverage an opportunity to show what it looks like when workers at a warehouse are on break? To answer these questions, I need to look at the data in the simulation and find out how many kids are present at a residence, how many workers are in a commercial building, or how many executives a manufacturing operation might support. In this way, I can surprise an observant player with a fact-at-a-glance while wandering around the city as I have surprised myself when I saw an injured Sim standing in front of his home, hoping an ambulance might arrive to speed him away to recovery. As any good mayor would, I quickly built a clinic nearby, and he was quickly retrieved and cared for.

You might see some shabby looking characters huddled around the entrance of a park, which will prompt you to check the deeper data on hand to see the extent of your homeless population. Seeing a mob of Sims outside City Hall might cause you to inspect your tax rates. If there are large groups of Sims gathered around bus stops for an extended period of time, you will know that you should add more buses to your transportation network.

The City Services of SimCity

John Giordano, Gameplay Scripter

Greetings fellow SimCity lovers! My name is John Giordano. I am a Gameplay Scripter. My role in the project has been focused on scripting mainly for the Fire, Power, and Waste Disposal systems. What I do is write code in the GlassBox Engine scripting language that determines how these systems will interact with the simulation. The work that I do involves a lot of logic. It’s like a giant, crazy game of chess, only we have hundreds of thousands of game pieces and one hundred times more rules! In any case, I’ve been knee-deep in building this game with my scripting brethren here at Maxis. Needless to say, we are proud of what is shaping up to be a fantastic simulation game!

I am very proud to be working on this game because I am a huge SimCity fan in my own right. (I have all the Maxis manuals from SimCity classic onwards scattered on my desk.) I am glad to have worked on many of the building expansion options that you will have for city services. To give you an example, you can open any city service building in the building editor, and start modifying it in a number of interesting ways. For instance, I worked on a fire bell that you can add to the Fire Station that will halve the amount of time it takes for a fire truck to respond to fire. This is important, because you will find that in order to build a thriving city, you will have to expand services in ways like this. If you’ve got buildings that are at a high risk for fire, like industrial factories, you may decide to add a Fire Marshal Office to the Large Fire Station. When you do this, you’ll see someone going from door to door, inspecting hazardous buildings, and reducing the risk of fire significantly!

The best part about our city services this time around is that everything is a real simulation. In past games, these systems would be statistical models that would add to a radius in which all nearby buildings would get an area of effect. In this SimCity , the simulation is that a house really catches on fire and the fire trucks really respond to it. There is no invisible simulation here; it’s all raw and right in front of you.

Each city service building has a basic and more advanced type of building that you can put down. For instance, the police system has the classic Police Station that you start out with that can be expanded with more police cars, but if you’re really steering your city towards safety, you will get offered a Police Precinct. This is a huge building with more police coverage and expansion options. My favorite so far is the Detective Wing. This guy will actually go throughout your city to start solving crimes, finding out where suspects live, and calling in backup to come take them down.

All these options can be shared with other cities in a region. For instance, if my neighboring city builds a Hospital with a Surgical Center, we can share those benefits together. In this case it would allow our injured Sims to heal much faster, making it easier to manage health in both of our cities. If I wanted, I could tell my neighboring city to add a Diagnostic Lab, which would help detect diseases and reduce sickness recovery time.

There’s really much more gameplay that you will get out of these expandability options that past SimCity games didn’t have. Every service building you build will be a little bit different, with different functionalities. You might make a helicopter-only service town. You may invest in community outreach and prevent problems before they start. There’s so much more meat on the bone this time, and we can’t wait to get you digging into this delicious SimCity experience as soon as possible!

How I Mayor: Trade City

John Scott Clarke, Software Engineer

Day One

My name is John Scott Clarke and I am a Software Engineer and JavaScript developer for the SimCity team. I thought it would be fun to share some thoughts about a city in a region I’ve been playing with my six-year-old daughter after work. It’s been fun to play the game with her, though her sense of city design tends to leave out important things like building industries and commerce to create jobs and allow freight to be sold for profit. I’m happy she even wants to play, so I am not going to bore her trying to explain those needs. Instead, I decided that after she went to sleep I would just build a neighboring city that would be a heavy industry with no cares to pollution or its residents. That will help balance out her utopia of parks and trees which resulted in a glut of high-wealth houses and shops.

Unfortunately, the best spot for an industrial city on the region map was now taken by my daughter’s city, so I settled with a neighboring spot with some coal and decided I would just trade for everything else I needed. There is also another neighboring city I have been using to test out various things, so it will also benefit nicely from an industrial city nearby.

First thing first, find the coal deposits using the Coal data map (they appear as black marks on the ground) and make sure I have major roads leading up to them for the coal mines. It’s too early to start mining just yet; I have to build a town of some sort first so that I have workers, power, and water to support a mine. Workers also need shops, and shops need freight from industry, so I need to get all that rolling before I can plop a mine.

Day Two

Now that I have the Simoleons and infrastructure to support a mine, I go ahead and plop it. Too bad for those shops across the street—hope they don’t mind the pollution! (Muahahahahah!!) The mine will start operating as soon as workers arrive, so I need to find something to do with all the coal the mine will produce. I could plop a Coal Power Plant, but I don’t want to start paying for that just yet, so I decide to plop a Trade Depot instead. The Trade Depot gives me extra space to store coal and lets me trade it on the global market for additional income outside of taxes. I will be able to import and export other resources at the trade lot, too, but for now, all I care about is coal.

With the Trade Depot placed and trading on the global market, I turn my focus back to the Coal Mine and bump up the output on that by adding extra Coal Shafts. This will help to unlock the Metals Headquarters faster and boost income a bit via trade. I want the HQ so I can then unlock the Smelting Factory, which lets me create alloy and metal from coal and ore. Metals sell at higher prices than just coal, so it should be worth it to get a Smelting Factory up and running.

Day Three

While I wait for unlocks, I take the time to build more residential, commercial, and industrial to boost income from taxes while also adding new workers. Health is always a big problem in industry-based cities, so I place a Clinic as my first way to combat all the germs that the pollution is spreading. It’s not going to solve my city’s health problem, but since it’s expandable with buildings (like the option to add more Ambulance Bays or Patient Rooms as needed) it does at least give me a way to relieve the pressure to help keep my residential zones from going completely abandoned.

Day Four

Now I have the Metal and Trade HQs unlocked and placed. This will let me place my Smelting Factory and a Trade Port, which is an upgraded version of the Trade Depot. The Trade Port lets me import and export resources via both rail and water instead of just roads, which is going to allow me to make a lot more money. I also set up both a bus system and a Passenger Train Station to help get commuting workers in and out of the city faster.

Day Five

My industrial city is up and running. Its budget is suffering because I had to import ore to keep my Smelting Factories running (I sadly don’t have any to mine in my own city), but otherwise the city is humming along nicely with some help from its neighbors. In turn, it’s providing jobs and freight, as well as water, sewage, and garbage services to its neighbors. All those neighbors have also worked together to build one of our Great Works! Pretty impressive.

Owning the Streets of SimCity

Guillaume Pierre, Lead Gameplay Scripter

Hello SimCity fans! I’m Guillaume Pierre, Lead Gameplay Scripter on SimCity . My team and I build the game’s simulation using the GlassBox Engine. Here I’m going to talk about something dear to my and transportation geeks’ hearts: mass transit!

When left unchecked, cars will quickly take over city streets, resulting in massive traffic jams and the economic loop coming to a stop. Your Sims won’t be able to get to work on time, robbers will get away as police cars get stuck, and trash will mount as garbage trucks can’t make their rounds anymore! To solve your traffic problem in SimCity , we’re providing a variety of public transportation options, starting with the shuttle buses and going all the way to the heavy rail trains and beyond.

Shuttle buses are the cheapest and easiest mass transit system to set up. These small buses carry a limited number of passengers and are appropriate for smaller cities. To set some up, you just need to place a Shuttle Bus Depot, plop some stops on the sidewalks of your residential, business, and factory districts, and Sims will start riding the shuttle. At some point, you may invest in the larger municipal buses by building a Bus Terminal, and Sims will queue up at the same stops as they did before to ride them. You can also plop some Park and Ride stops that Sims will drive to and park their cars at before taking the bus.

In this SimCity , we’re also introducing streetcars, which ride on a dedicated track in the middle of avenues, and carry more Sims than the shuttle or municipal buses. You can also connect two separate parts of town with rail tracks placed by themselves, without car lanes or sidewalks.

Some of the biggest vehicles going through your cities are trains, which come from the region and bring in tourists and neighbors into your city, more so than could ever drive in from the regional highway. Your Sims may even ride the train between two stations on opposite sides of town, or use them to go to neighboring cities. Rail is by far my favorite mode of transit; it really makes the city feels like a model train set.

Much like in real life, people will only walk so far to take public transportation, so when placing public transportation stops, we show you that distance as a green bar directly on the sidewalks via a data layer. As a result, you can easily tell which neighborhoods are accessible, and which ones Sims will have to drive out of. Each stop is responsible for figuring out what kind of destination exists near it, be it a work place, a home, or even another stop that may lead Sims to their eventual destination. Your Sims may very well start their journey aboard a local shuttle bus, then transfer to a streetcar, and eventually to a train in order to work at the factory town next door.

You evaluate the performance of their systems by checking:

1. How many people are waiting to be picked up.
2. How long they have to wait on average.
3. How many passengers are currently riding in vehicles.
4. How many have been dropped off that day.

Each stop has similar information available, so it’s possible to really drill down on the data and make decisions on whether to add more vehicles or turn off infrequently used stops.

The Circulatory System of SimCity

Tyler Thompson, Gameplay Producer

Hi everyone! I’m Tyler Thompson, the Gameplay Producer here at Maxis, and I’ve really enjoyed helping the team make the new SimCity into a great game.

The new SimCity ’s simulation is driven by Sims, road networks, and traffic. I enjoy explaining it with a biological metaphor. The roads are the city’s arteries and veins. The Sims circulate through those roads. They help keep the city alive by going to work, making factories run, keeping stores open, taking home money, going shopping with money, etc. Power, water, and sewage also flow under the roads. Almost every building relies on a vehicle to be effective: garbage trucks, police patrol cars, coal delivery trucks, school buses, taxis, and more. The result is a city where the streets are filled with a variety of vehicles and pedestrians, streaming from place to place and keeping the simulation alive.

Traffic jams strangle like a heart attack. Several times, I have looked up from decorating a casino to see dreaded lines of red tail lights. The consequences are pretty dire. Ambulances don’t get to injured Sims before they die. Police don’t make it to the bank in time to stop a robbery. The Coal Power Plant shuts down from lack of workers. Homes and factories are starting to become abandoned at the edges of the city. In a panic, I start demolishing troublesome intersections, replacing roads, and adding new avenues across town. I also apply some civic “blood thinner”. I create a mass transit system featuring shuttle buses, large municipal buses, streetcars, and trains. This usually clears the major arteries and gets things flowing again.

Combine this circulatory system with our curvy road tool, and it means that you can make functional, organically shaped cities. We’ve made face-shaped cities, concentric rings, guitar-shaped cities, and on and on. Often, the city’s topography encourages curves. Riverside towns can have a snaking boardwalk. Mountainside cities bend around the base. Lakeside cities with a high-wealth district hug the waterfront. Yeah, I love to play optimized grids, but this game is frequently tempting me to throw away the ruler and start painting roads with a brush.

These curvy, organic cities can be effective because the simulation isn’t about distances—it’s about flow. When you start to understand this, it totally changes how you lay things out. When I place a Fire Station, I usually try to find a place that is central, well connected but not near heavy traffic. When I create a central avenue, I often limit the number of intersections with it so that cars don’t wait for light after light. I sprinkle commercial sectors at the ends of residential roads to encourage pedestrian traffic. As the city grows, I watch for the long line of red brake lights and plop down bus stops like crazy.

Many times, I find myself just sitting back and watching the flow.

Specializing SimCity

Stone Librande, Lead Designer

Hello again! This is Stone Librande, the Lead Designer of SimCity . One of the great things about working on this game is seeing the incredible progress the team has made. Every day I’m treated to another exciting new addition to the game: a new glass and steel skyscraper, a group of skateboarding Sims in a park, or the sight of the moon reflecting on the water as the sun goes down. It is truly inspiring to be working here with the talented team at Maxis.

One feature of the game that I have been concentrating on is the area of city specialization. SimCity allows a single player—or a group of players if you choose to play with other aspiring city builders—to connect up multiple cities in a larger region and share services and resources. This means that you don’t need to put a power plant (or a Water Treatment Plant, or a Fire Station, or a school…) in every city in the region. Instead, you can focus on the types of buildings that make your city special and then have other cities supply the additional things you need. For example, you could make a completely suburban city with only houses and parks. Support it with a neighboring industrial city and your Sims will commute down the highway each morning on their way to work and then return back again at night.

You can also start up a city specialization (or two, or more) in your city. City specializations are new to SimCity and offer a unique way to play. In essence, they let you take on the role of a business mogul in addition to your typical role as the Mayor. There are five city specializations in the game: metals, petroleum, electronics, trade, and gambling. Each city specialization has a corresponding leaderboard, which makes it easy to see how you compare to other players operating that same business. Your rank is determined by the total amount of profit you have made during the last twelve game months. This encourages smart play, since you need to optimize your profits each month over the year; simply grinding away for long periods of time isn’t an effective strategy to get to the top.

Three of these city specialization types revolve around manufacturing. The first two, Metals and Petroleum, rely on extracting resources from the ground and processing them into more valuable resources. If you want to get involved in these specialties, make sure to inspect the region to find where the coal, ore, and oil deposits are before you claim your city. As you advance your metals business, you can dig up larger quantities of coal and ore. You can make even more money if you start a Smelting Factory to convert your minerals into metals and alloy. If you opt for a petroleum specialization, you can drill for oil and then use a refinery to convert it into fuel and plastics. The third type of manufacturing, Electronics, doesn’t need to dig up its resources; it converts shipments of metal, alloys, and plastic into processors, TVs, and computers. These high tech resources have the highest profit margins, but you will need a substantial investment in education and transportation infrastructure if you want to keep your factories humming.

The Trade specialization is all about buying low and selling high. It typically means your city will have many trucks, freight trains, and cargo ships moving goods into and out of your city. The key to a successful city is to import when the global market price is low and export when the price is high. Around the office, a lot of us tend to specialize our cities around one form of manufacturing plus a little bit of trade. This helps us get our metals, petroleum, or electronics resources to the market more efficiently.

Finally, there is the Gambling city specialization. This one is my personal favorite. It is a great choice for players that want to focus on tourists instead of markets. Your goal with a gambling city is to attract as many tourists as possible, which requires building airports, docks for cruise ships, train stations, and buses. But getting tourists into your city is only half the battle. You need to keep them there by building hotels and other entertainment options. Watching a bustling neon-filled casino city come to life at night is mesmerizing.

No matter how you choose to specialize your city, it is important to remember that it is your choice. Feel free to mix and match traditional SimCity buildings (schools, parks, Police Stations, etc.) with city specializations. Decide your proportion of residential, commercial, and industrial by zoning. Make a simple town with trailer parks or maximize your density with skyscrapers. Supply the region with power and water or buy it from someone else. There is no right way or wrong way to play. Discovering the benefits and drawbacks of the multitude of combinations is one of the hallmarks of SimCity !

Build and Destroy: Detailing Disasters

Alex Peck, Development Director

Hi everyone! I’m Alex Peck, a development director on SimCity . The first time I saw the original SimCity at a friend’s house, I was so intrigued by it that I snuck away from his dinner party to get some more time on his computer. Ten years later, I was privileged to work on SimCity 4 and SimCity 4 Rush Hour, and now ten years after that I’m here at Maxis working on a new take on the series.

SimCity is a game that really satisfies our creative urges. But it’s always had a darker side in the form of disasters. Random disasters are good at shaking up a city and keeping things from becoming too static. And user-controlled disasters are for the player who likes to kick over his own sandcastles—you know who you are.

Our first prototype disaster in the new SimCity was the meteor shower. It started out as just a single meteorite smacking into a residential suburb, but upon seeing it in action, we immediately decided to dial it up to see what would happen. We added some tension by having most of the meteors burn up before they hit the ground—we call these “fizzlers”—but an unpredictable amount of larger, damaging meteorites may appear during the sequence.

While we were creating this, out of sheer curiosity I checked to see how often meteorites actually cause damage, and it seems rather rare. Wikipedia only notes a few human injuries, a dog in Egypt, and one extremely unfortunate cow. Guess the solar system that SimCity is located in must have far more debris than our own!

UFOs in particular resulted in a fun brainstorming session. Rather than simply wantonly raining destruction from above, we thought UFOs should have a bit of a mysterious flavor to them. They will enter your city with various agendas to carry out, perhaps simply leaving if they can’t find what they are looking for. What are the aliens going to do with that poor Sim they abducted? I leave it to your imagination.

For this incarnation of the game we also decided to add some physics to the mix, resulting in buildings that shatter into pieces and fall to the ground. This paid off when someone said “Can the UFO cut a building in half?” and our physics programmer Robert Perry said, “Sure!” (Check out Robert’s discussion on physics next.)

Whether it’s an earthquake, a meteor shower, a tornado, or even the simple demolition tool, we have provided a number of tools to cater to your darker side.

Shaking it Up: SimCity ’s Physics

Robert Perry, Physics Engineer

Hey everyone! I’m Robert Perry and I’m the engineer in charge of physics for SimCity . The two things I enjoy most are building things and solving problems. SimCity is a fun way for me to do both.

When we use the phrase, “what you see is what we sim,” we really mean it. With that said, why should physics get left out? Physics provides another tool to simulate what happens in a city. We’ve coupled physics with the GlassBox engine to create an even deeper simulation. Every building in SimCity is simulated in the physics engine. Buildings are attached to the ground with a physics model that simulates the forces that act on that building. When a module is stacked on a building, the building reacts. If multiple modules are stacked on a building, they all react. If an object strikes a building, the building reacts—modules included.

Disasters are where the physics system is put to best use. Disasters are able to affect the game physics in a variety of ways. A small meteorite will set a building rocking; a large one will reduce it to a pile of rubble on the blackened, scorched ground. Physics is a great simulation tool and it adds depth and nuance to the game, but there are some things we don’t solve using physics. One example is vehicles. The transport team has done a great job with the vehicles and there’s not a lot the physics would add there. Vehicles turn, merge, and navigate with detailed behavior. At the scale the vehicles operate at the physics system wouldn’t add enough benefit to justify the cost in performance.

When we’ve hit instances where physics alone isn’t the best solution, we’ve been able to team up with the artists to create integrated solutions. Simulating a tornado is far beyond the scope of SimCity . We use a hybrid approach with the tornado that allows an artist to create a particle system to drive physics bodies. The tornado sucks up buildings and vehicles, drives them up and through its funnel with an animated particle system, and seamlessly releases them to the physics system. The final result is that tornados will chew through your city and fling buildings and vehicles like a giant blender that has been released in your city.

Earthquakes, in particular, make for good use of physics, as triggering this particular disaster will shake buildings to the ground (as one would expect). And UFOs, besides abducting Sims and stealing resources, will slice buildings in two with a laser. Typical alien behavior.

What I’ve talked about here is just a small taste of what to expect in the new SimCity . As you know, disasters have always been a big part of SimCity and they’re better than ever. Make no mistake, buildings will crumble, debris will fly, and stuff will explode. This SimCity is a simulation with great depth and detail. Physics allows us to layer on more detail and ultimately bring more fun to SimCity . I’m looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks of the disasters.

Popping the Bubble: Exploring SimCity World

Meghan McDowell, Producer

Hi everyone! My name is Meghan McDowell and I’m a producer on SimCity . I’ve worked at Maxis for eight years and I’m really pleased to be part of the new SimCity . Part of my role here at the studio is to shape the SimCity World feature.

SimCity World is a collection of features that enhance a player’s game experience by connecting them with one another. Through challenges, leaderboards, and the global market, SimCity World lets mayors shape their cities’ stories in different ways, connect and engage with each other, and contribute to a global SimCity community. We built the SimCity World features as a way to surface that interconnected world to the player and show them how their gameplay can be complemented by being a part of it.

Part of our way of doing that is through CityLog, the tool that allows players to connect, notify, and act on events in SimCity . CityLog does a lot of things. It allows you to see if your friends have founded new cities in regions that you can join. Or it tells you that your friends have passed you on a leaderboard. If there’s a challenge going on in a region, it shows you your progress. It even messages any global market changes you may want to take advantage of. Lastly, it lets you know about any achievements your friends are earning in case you want to strive to achieve the same ones. All of the messages you see in CityLog have an action you can take. You don’t have to act, but if you are looking for new and interesting ways to play (or just want to keep tabs on what your friends are doing), CityLog can help keep you up to date.

One of the new ways to play is through our regular challenges. Challenges are competitive, where regions compete against each other and vie to win exclusive rewards. Challenges are completely optional, but are a great way to prove to the world what kind of Mayor you are. They take strategy and coordination to succeed at. You can work alone, with your region, or with the entire community to complete them.

To coincide with challenges we also have leaderboards. There are many different types of leaderboards in the game and they encourage you to compete or simply to see how you compare to the rest of the mayors in SimCity . They range from traditional leaderboards like biggest population, more deviant boards like biggest polluters, and competitive leaderboards like most profitable casino city. You can compare yourself to the global SimCity community or to your friends. Right now, I’m gunning for the top of the Crime leaderboards in the studio. I’m quite the lawless Mayor!

The global market makes up the last piece of SimCity World, and it is here where goods and resources can be bought and sold. The market fluctuates depending on how our players are playing. Players can affect the global market by how they play. So if oil prices are up, players may decide to invest in oil drilling in their city so that they can profit from it by selling the goods to other players.

Before I go, I just wanted to say I’m having a lot of fun playing SimCity and every day something fun, unexpected, and amazing goes on in the game. I’m excited for all of you to get your hands on it. See you on the leaderboard!

SimCity Image Filters

Ocean Quigley, Creative Director

Hi—Ocean Quigley here to tell you about some of the final touches I’ve added to SimCity .

A big part of what makes a game look beautiful is the way that all of the colors work together. Usually, an artist does what’s called “color grading” to make everything look just right. You’ve probably seen examples of it in movies – think of the sepia tones of O Brother, Where Art Thou? or the vivid greens and reds of Amélie or the teal and orange menu of pretty much any Michael Bay movie ever. In fact, it’s kind of startling to look at movie footage before it’s been color graded—it looks OK, but nothing like it does when it’s finished.

Instagram and Hipstamatic, among many others, have turned that process into filters that you can apply to your snapshots. And what filter you choose makes a big impact on how the photo makes you feel. Different people respond to different filters, and people have their favorites (and ones that they hate).

For SimCity , rather than choose for you, I figured it was best to let you make up your own mind. So I’ve come up with a bunch of different filters that give different sensibilities to the game. You can use whichever ones you like. Here’s the first batch. Take a look:

Starting with the default view, without any filter.

This is the Juicy filter. It’s a bit darker in mid-tones and adds a warm saturation to the scene.

The Film Noir filter does a filtered black and white transform.

This is Soft. It’s Kip Katsarelis’s favorite filter. It bleaches and mutes the colors just a little bit, making the city look more realistic. I think that a lot of people are going to wind up playing with this one.

Warmer is Guillaume Pierre’s favorite filter. It pushes the menu into a brownish range and is modeled on your standard FPS colors.

Cooler is Scott Nagy’s favorite filter. It gives the game a cool, mid-century Kodachrome feel.

Neutral is basically the same as having no filter, just with a little bit more contrast. Faded washes out the colors, and adds a little silvering to everything. Green Tones is modeled on 1970s-era movies. Platinum is kind of a silly one, but I liked it. It’s evocative of Hollywood glamour photography from the golden age of cinema. Teal and Orange is your typical Hollywood blockbuster menu. It brings out the contrast in the game. Orange and Gray washes out all the colors except orange.

The Neutral filter just punches the contrast a little bit and adds vignetting.

This is the Faded filter, which washes out greens and blues.

Green Tones is inspired by mid-1970s movie film stock.

Here’s the Platinum filter, for that 1930s glamour look, complete with a little solarization.

And the Hollywood favorite, Teal and Orange. I like it a lot, despite its cliched reputation.

Orange and Gray takes all of the colors that aren’t red/orange and makes them gray. Pretty simple.

Bleached emulates a bleach bypass technique, like you see in fashion photography. Sepia Toned makes the game feel like it’s all old-timey. Black and Red is a super-high-contrast menu, inspired by a movie that sounded a lot like SimCity . Desaturated is another hardcore FPS-style menu, with most of the colors stripped out. And Vintage is inspired by cross-processed film. It looks like the 1970s to me.

Bleached applies a bleach-bypass-style filter. It’s a technique you see in a lot of fashion photography.

The Sepia Toned filter, which makes everything look kind of old fashioned.

Switching to the Black and Red filter, which gives the city a more menacing quality.

Desaturated pulls out most of the color, for people who don’t like bright colors in their video games.

And Vivid is for people who do.

Here’s the Vintage filter, which looks like cross-processed film. It’s got a 1970s vibe, I think.

In addition to filters that stylize the game with different color treatments, there are more functional ones. These filters apply various transforms to make the game more playable to people who are color blind. There are a few other graphics options to make the game look the way that you want it to. You can turn the tilt-shift effect up or down. And you can turn on the ultra lighting effects to get in-camera lens flare and blooming when you look at bright light sources. It makes the camera relate to lighting in a more realistic way.

SimCity is a game with a tremendous amount of player creativity. I wanted to extend those options to the way that you look at the game itself. Thanks!

SimCity ’s Art of Building

Mike Khoury, Art Director

Hi everyone! I’m Mike Khoury and I’m an Art Director on SimCity . I joined life at Maxis way back on the SimCity 4: Rush Hour expansion. I began work on the new SimCity pretty early on with Creative Director Ocean Quigley, and helped build out the style and look for the game. I prototyped the first Sim and made the first production building with our toolset back when we were first starting out.

We’ve come a long way since then. I currently art direct the player-placed buildings in our game. Basically, buildings that service your city, like fire stations, schools, and bus stations. These buildings span from simple buildings, to complex industrial facilities, and even famous landmarks. Our modular buildings span function across residential, commercial, or industrial types of architecture. And the modules themselves provide both gameplay benefits as well changes to the actual building. For instance, you can attach extra classrooms to a school to house more students or you can place a fire alarm on top of a Fire Station to decrease firefighter response times.

One of the best parts of working on this game, as a science geek, is all the research and knowledge you accumulate by having to make all these varied systems and objects. On the “buildings team” as we call it, we are always working closely with engineers, designers, and scripters to design and make buildings that are modular and have function to how they are assembled. The challenge with these buildings is to make them still look believable and realistic and fit within our game scale, even though they are put together in parts and can be assembled in different ways. As a designer of modular buildings, the challenge is to make a language of parts that are interesting and work well together, rather than a single final product.

My schooling and background is in industrial design, so I have a passion and a knack for designing such objects and systems. I also was the Lead Artist responsible for the creature, building, and vehicle editors in Spore. The challenges Spore presented for making the editable parts are similar to the challenges these modular buildings are currently giving us.

Now that you understand what we’re creating, let’s talk about the process we use to make one of the modular buildings and the family of buildings it belongs to. Let’s look at coal. Several buildings span that category in our game: Coal Mines (which extract the raw resource and can also refine it), Coal Power Plants (which use the coal to power cities), and coal storage and shipping lots (which store the coal and allow for building an empire of trade). As I mentioned earlier, basic research is the foundation of creating one of our buildings because we want to try to stay faithful to the simulation and to the core of SimCity style, which is grounded in contemporary reality.

The design team usually boils down the basic functionality they need out of the buildings in a design document, including how game agents like Sims and vehicles interact with it. We start by researching those basic functioning buildings online and in books. In the case of coal, I even had a chance to visit a remote gold mining ghost town in California, which was awesome. We then meet about that idea as a group and look at our visual research, and talk about how this would work and feel like in the game.

Once we have gathered a bunch of research and feel confident as a team that we have the basic idea nailed down, a concept artist will go off and sketch the building out in small, loose sketches. Although the sketches are loose, they need to follow a convention of scale to work in the game.

All our modular buildings adhere strictly to a unit-based system of measurement, so everything needs to be built to specific increments of size to be able to “snap” to other parts properly. The combinatory nature of these types of interactions for even three or four modules interacting with each other can get quite complex quickly when you take into account things like alignment, usage of space, and look/feel/scale of objects, as well as trying to not make everything look like it’s made of similar homogenous boxy shapes.

Once the concept artist comes back with sketches, we decide to go with a direction and move into white-box (i.e., basic untextured) modeling phase. In this stage we are roughly modeling the forms and masses in 3D software, adhering to our system of units for size, and assign what we call snapping properties to the different modules depending on how we want them to attach or snap to each other. Once we have assigned the specific snap properties to the module, we try it out in game as a white-box and evaluate scale, form, and basic snap behavior and usability. Design and scripting can now work with this basic white-box for a while, assigning different behaviors and attributes to it to make the building work and do its job.

It becomes apparent quickly if a module is too big or small or doesn’t allow for enough flexibility to accommodate gameplay. We then adjust this white-box according to feedback and put it through the review process. Once we have a good white-box and it passes the tests, we start the detailed color concept phase. Our concept artists use the original loose sketch, the accumulated visual research, and the white-box geometry as a blank canvas to paint in the lighting, textures, and detail in a 2D rendering that make the building look finished. When we have an approved color concept, we take the white-box model and begin to fully detail and texture the model, using proprietary in-house tools to match the 2D color concept as closely as possible in our game engine.

This then becomes our first take at a building. Other art teams like VFX, lot designers, lighting artists, and animators then take turns at this final model to give it polish and life. Of course in reality this doesn’t happen sequentially, and often one artist is working in a preliminary stage and updating their work when the building is finalized later. The white-box model becomes a great branching point where a lot of different hands can get to a model, and still allow for art to continue to polish and make it look final over time.

Well I hope this was a good read for you and provided some insight into how we craft our content in house.

The Sound and Music of SimCity

Kent Jolly, Audio Director

Hello, I’m Kent Jolly, the audio director for SimCity . I’ve been with Maxis since 1998. The first big game that I worked on was SimCity 3000 as a sound designer, and from there I went on to work on The Sims, SimCity 4, and Spore. It’s really cool to be working on SimCity again after such a long time. There is so much more we can do now than we could have done before. I’m going to talk a little bit about how we’ve implemented traffic sound effects in this game.

One of my favorite aspects of SimCity , and especially this new SimCity , is the challenge of creating a great traffic and city ambience. The reason I’m singling out the traffic is because it’s amazing how different it is this time around. Because of the GlassBox engine, the traffic is no longer a representation of congestion or road type, it’s actually showing you where people in your city are going. People are on their way to work, going out of town, going to the shop, going home, and more. That means that cars don’t just disappear because there isn’t “traffic” there, and it means that you don’t see trucks in an industrial area just because it’s an industrial area, you see all of this happening in your city because it’s really moving resources from a manufacturing plant to a commercial store and so on. So, how does that affect audio?

In previous SimCity games we simply counted the number of cars and then played sounds randomly in that general area to replicate the simulation. If it was a residential area then you got “residential” car sounds, and if it was an industrial area you heard more truck sounds. In this SimCity the cars are actually tracked individually! We wait for a car to hit a stop light and then when it leaves the intersection we can play a sound of a car pulling away—and not just any car sound, the right car sound! We can also track the car as it moves and play a sound as it drives past.

We also change the sound based on the simulation speed of the game. As the cars go faster and faster, we adjust the audio to match what you see, but it remains true to the actual traffic.

I’ve worked on the SimCity franchise since SimCity 3000, and there has always been great music. Obviously, the new SimCity is no exception. Our composer Chris Tilton (who has worked on popular TV shows like Fringe) has done an amazing job, delivering not only great compositions, but compositions recorded with interactivity in mind.

The music in SimCity works a lot like the previous ones in the sense that there are full-length tunes that are chosen to play back at random, like a jukebox. The difference is that in this version the “jukebox” is a little more intelligent. Rather than just picking a tune to play, we look at the population of the city and pick a tune that is suited to the size of the city. As your city grows, so does the playlist of music, and you get tunes that feel “bigger” and more dramatic as your cities grow larger.

In addition to the playlist changing based on city size, the music changes based on your zoom level and whether or not you are viewing the game normally, are in Region View, or are using the building editor (the in-game editor that allows you to customize certain buildings). We did this by splitting the music up into several “stems” that can work in conjunction with each other, but also can stand on their own. So, when you go into a “light” data layer (where we showcase small visual elements like power/water traveling to buildings), we add percussion. When you go into a “heavy” data layer (where we show off more data-focused charts and graphs), we play up the electric guitar, drop other elements completely, and process the percussion with effects. When you are zoomed out, we use the orchestra, but when you zoom in it gets replaced with guitar.

So that’s the music design in a nutshell. It was a blast to put this together, and a real treat to go to Warner Brothers and sit in on the recording sessions with Chris Tilton. I hope you enjoy the music in SimCity as much as I do!

The Sounds of Nonsense: Recording Simlish

Kadet Kuhne, Audio Specialist

Hi there! I’m Kadet Kuhne and I want to share a glimpse of the casting, recording, and implementation process for SimCity . I was hired on to the sound team at Maxis as a Voice Director and Sound Designer, and it has been a blast and truly an honor to work with such a talented team of artists on this awesome iteration of SimCity .

Working under the direction of Audio Director Kent Jolly and Designer Shawn Stone, our goal was to record a vast array of voices according to various archetypes covering residential, commercial, and industrial domains. These include residents, professionals, business persons, government employees, foremen, blue collar workers, industry barons, high tech bosses, and police and fire department workers, just to name a few. To start our recording session, I sent our character wish list along with audio samples, written Simlish examples, and audition instructions to EA’s internal service that sends out casting calls to voice talent agencies. Within days, I received plenty of options to sift through.

One fascinating aspect of casting for SimCity was listening to hundreds of auditions in Simlish (the fictional, needs-based Sims language originally developed through experimentation with fractured Ukrainian, French, Latin, Finnish, English, Fijian, and Tagalog) while, at the same time, seeking nuanced performances according to character type, age, occupation, and emotion. Unique from previous incarnations of Simlish, our aim was to also include accents exemplifying various countries, though by no means representative of all. The timbre of the voices of the talent along with notable acting and recording experience was substantial enough to successfully illustrate the characters I was seeking to cast with my final candidates.

Recording at EA in Redwood City was a highlight of the process. With two rounds of sessions covering multiple days along with Engineers Miik Dinko and Christopher Davidson and the diverse stream of talent, there was no shortage of determined focus and humorous outtakes. For each character we recorded four emotional deliveries—happy, neutral, angry, and sad—at three different lengths covering a range of one- to six-second sound bites. In SimCity , the Sims are viewed from an aerial perspective, so the greatest challenge for the talent was projecting their voices loudly while simultaneously conveying the intended emotion and accent or tone of their character. We captured thousands of takes for the missions they send you on. We also recorded plenty of wild sounds for use in the game that cover events like Sims arriving at home, PA announcements at work, and reactionary screams for when disasters strike.

After selecting and editing the best takes, the files were mastered and given a touch of reverb and equalization to set the spatial signature of a cityscape. Then I uploaded each character into “random containers” for each mood and length. When a player clicks on a character’s speech bubble in game, the appropriate group of samples is chosen by the software to match the text, and different takes are heard each time, which increases gameplay variety. There are also female and male versions for every role that gets called up at random by the code—transportation chiefs, auto foremen, coal barons, doctors, teachers, bus drivers, city advisors, police chiefs, and so many more populate the vast world of SimCity .

After months of playing SimCity through many stages of development, it is such a thrill to see the characters come to life with their unique and expressive voices. The directives and opinions of the Sims given to players in the text-based speech bubbles are now effectively personalized with the emotive tonality of the characters speaking. Plus, there are tons of opportunities to hear these characters move about your city that we are loading in daily, such as greeting you upon clicking on them as they walk down the street or hearing them call out a goodbye to their co-workers after a long day at the factory. Listen carefully because your city is filled with distinct voices from various walks of life!