Just Announced Midsummer Studios Already Set to Release Demo this year 2024 of Their Upcoming Life Sim Game and Directly Calls Out The Sims. Jake Solomon Reveals More Gameplay Information in Various Interviews.
The founder of Midsummer Studios, Jake Solomon, has given us more information about the new life sim game with a demo due to release this year 2024!
He also directly calls out and confirms they are competing with the Sims. throws down the gauntlet.
He also gives us more information about the mystery game title:
“We’re at an interesting time as players of life sims,” Solomon said in a statement to Variety. “I thought I looked pretty smart over a year ago when I left my former studio and announced that I was going to make a life sim to compete with the long running (and really only show in town) ‘The Sims.’ Now, there are four or five (seemingly great) competitors being developed. Our difference is that we’re focused on story. Specifically, the story that the players write themselves just by playing the game. The player controls the story they want to tell, and in fact, when the game starts the player can choose from multiple “themes” that define their story. For example they can tell the game that they want to tell a story about finding their soulmate while also succeeding at their small town business.
“We use that information at game start to then generate an interesting cast of supporting characters and seed them with relationships that will instantly create a ‘narrative rich’ environment. If the player wants to tell a romantic story, then we might generate a cast where one person is an ex-lover AND a coworker, one is your high school sweetheart AND your neighbor, and one is your secret crush but also runs a rival business in town. In this way, the game already starts in an interesting place that our players will want to explore. Our players will be able to share the characters they create, the storylines they tell, and even entire towns that they have customized. We intend to have a community hub that allows players to easily upload their own creations and download the creations of other players right into their game.”
Solomon says Midsummer Studios plans “to grow slowly and to limit our overall studio size in order to make ourselves as flexible and efficient as possible, while giving our team a sustainable, steady place to work (which is no given in our current industry.)”
Midsummer has plans to reveal a demo in 2024 and later reveal a target launch date for the currently untitled life-sim game.
In an interview with PC Gamer, Midsummer Studios co-founder and creative director Jake Solomon divulged how his career making strategy games has actually always been building towards his longtime dream of a relationship simulator and his plans for a small town full of Gilmore Girls-style drama.
After working on Civilization games himself, the games Solomon later took creative lead on started to zoom in on characters and relationships with the ~soldier bond system in XCOM 2~, and then the ~friendship system~ in Marvel's Midnight Suns, a game he affectionately describes as his "little hero dating simulator" that he "lavished way too much attention on."
Now he says his dream as a designer has always been a game about high school and dating. "I think these things have always been kind of brewing in the back of my mind. And they've probably manifested in each game that I've designed," he says.
Midsummer Studios' first game sounds like it isn't solely about high school dating, but it's definitely all about the drama of personal relationships.The basics of Midsummer's yet-to-be-revealed game, as they stand, are this: You'll decide what kind of story you want to tell, whether it's about romance, family, or something else entirely, and the game will fill the town with characters and generate relationships between them—it almost sounds like starting a game of Dwarf Fortress. From a Sims-like overhead view of the world, you can play through a story divided into scenes where your character has wants and needs and has to juggle those relative to time, or you can go into a creative mode to inhabit any character you please, edit relationships, give orders, and play around in your sandbox.
"You're guiding a character through their daily life in a small town—and a small town is a very narrative rich environment," Solomon says. "Whether it's Gilmore Girls, which is the one I bring up maybe too often to my team, or it could be Stephen King … It's a narrative rich environment because everybody knows everybody."
Each scene is less about managing want meters as in The Sims series and more about juggling your character's motivations at any point in time. Scenes might have modifiers, like an unfortunate case of intestinal distress that will make your character want to go to the bathroom several times while trying to get through a date. If you aren't feeling the scene you're in though, creative mode lets you ditch the scene constraints entirely."We want the player to feel like they have enough things that they want to do in any particular scene but they can't possibly do all of them," Solomon says.
The idea is to create conditions that are ripe for generating "emergent stories," and though that's often a buzzword, Solomon has some specific ideas about what that means from his own time spent playing The Sims.
"I love The Sims. You play it and this amazing stuff happens. I'll be like: is my wife flirting with the old neighbor? What the fuck? And you want the game to be like: dun dun duuuuun!"
He envisions a game that recognizes when a dramatic moment is happening by understanding the relationships of everyone involved, and giving you a satisfying nod of the head for the drama you've managed to construct.
"The audience that we're interested in is the people, like if you go to Tumblr, they're the people who share the stories of their characters through screenshots and they do a lot of really, really incredible work," he says.
"What we're wrestling with right now is that there have to be some curated storylines but I think we want them to be very, very high level," he says, describing something that sounds a little like the events system in Crusader Kings 3, except with more dialogue. "The way we handle this is a character will come up to you and say 'oh I heard your father is back in town,' and this is a dialogue tree where the player has three very different options like 'I never want to talk to that man again' or 'yeah, he's here because he's getting married and I don't like his fiancee.'"
Solomon caveats this by saying that the details of all these systems are still being iterated on—adding that Midsummer Studios currently has 11 members and expects to become just 13 "for another year or so." It's clear the studio is already playing with very early prototypes of everything he describes, but it's a lot of very high-concept talk right now. I can't picture exactly how this game will play, but I do like where his head's at.
With all this talk about the live drama of a life sim, what about the build mode folks like me? Solomon says they want to eventually have decoration and interior redesigns and building your house from scratch, but as for having those things in for the initial launch he's not so confident. "Our guiding star is the idea of relationships and story and so that allows us to kind of deprioritize other features."
As much as the XCOM guy pivoting to a life sim warrants a double take, he does seem to get Sims players, referencing popular ~Sims 4 mods~ like Wicked Whims and the differences between Alpha and Maxis Match custom content.
As for the potential of a modding community for this game, Solomon is enthusiastic, saying he believes that mods are "essential," though isn't positive yet on the exact details around the level of support and tools Midsummer will share with players.
For the rest of the PC Gamer interview article and source found here
For more information about Midsummer Studios, see threads/posts & timestamped video here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeSimulators/comments/1crtqga/new_studio_opening_with_former_the_sims/
Intresting Things to note about Midsummer Studios
They hired Grant Rodiek who was a lead Producer in the Sims franchise since the Sims 2, although some of you may know him for his controversial response and weird takes on Twitter as Simguru Grant for the Sims 4. He was the Game Director of Project Rene (what many believe to WIP Sims 5) and publically and abruptly quit Maxis & Electronic Arts 3 months ago.
Their Team is small and consists of other former The Sims, Civilization and Xcom developers
-Krafton is the publisher for another Sims competitor life sim, InZoi and they are one of the funds funding Midsummer Studio. This adds legitimacy to Krafton is coming for the Sims Franchise and EA by any means necessary. They are clearly invested.
Discussion: What do you think about Solomon's overall vision for his Life Sim and his focus on relationships? Are you familiar with his previous work?Do you think him and the team have a enough experience with The Sims and life simulators to understand what players want? Are you excited for the release of the demo and announcement of the full release? What do you think of this unexpected news of a demo and the seemingly speedy time line? What are your thoughts in general?
These last 2 years have been a sim renaissance! Exciting time to be a life sim gamer because years ago this would have been unimaginable. I love the competition to the Sims, it will force the Sims franchise, and the overall Life Sim genre to innovate. Big deal since there was very little competition to none until recently.