@Erpe
From EA ( about how they made the toddlers )
We know how badly so many of our most passionate Simmers wanted to see toddlers in The Sims 4, and we’re so excited to add them in the latest free content update to the game*.
BS: It started by working with the Design and Production teams to figure out new interactions and skills for toddlers that would establish them as new and unique from previous versions of toddlers. On the animation team, we started by defining a style guide for toddlers that would help them feel different from other Sims in their world and give them character that made them stand out
Go behind-the-scenes with Jeff Weir, Art Director; Sarah Holding, Associate Producer; Joel Eckert, Game Designer and Brian Schubert, Senior Animator to see how the dev team built toddlers from scratch.
Q: What was the most challenging part of your work with toddlers?
JW: Toddlers have all that wonderful baby fat, huge cheeks, pug noses and doe-y eyes. It was a challenge to reverse engineer the look of children back into a younger age that still felt true to the character art direction of The Sims 4.
SH: Scope is always the most challenging part of any content design, but it was especially tricky with toddlers. We knew we wanted to support multiple skills with skill progression. We had to make sure we had enough content for each skill and that each skill felt unique.
BS: We had to update and improve on many core systems in our game engine. This presented many challenges to the entire team. We moved past this by prototyping and iterating heavily on things that required new tech to be added to the engine. Such as how a toddler is picked up by an adult Sim and carried around the world.
We start by blocking out the animation then refine it through what we call a polish pass. Once the animation is finished in Maya we will hook up and test the animation in our proprietary animation sequencer to ensure that all the technical aspects of getting an animation to work in the game engine are working as expected.
How did the team make sure that Toddlers look and feel like they belong in The Sims 4?
JE: It was important early on for us to have an early prototype we could easily rip apart and put back together in different ways to give us maximum flexibility when it came to our iterations. I think at about the fifth day in development we had created a very simple toddler and the very basic logic needed. We had a constant cycle of iteration and playing to ensure we were creating something that felt good within The Sims 4.
JE: We had a good list of Design Pillars that we used to keep laser focus on the right efforts, these four pillars guided our thoughts and designs. It was essential that toddlers were always doing something that fit into at least one if not more of these pillars.
Nurturing
Growth
Cute
Chaos
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This is from EA They were adding and creating new technogly while making the toddlers. also .
that required new tech to be added to the engine.
Oh, and when I said Simmers I was talking about us people who play the Sims. not the Developers of the Toddlers.
When they looked at the forums they looked for players posting good feedback on things they wanted to see in The Sims 4. Family players, of course, was a main focus but they also tried to listen to other player feedback about wanting a more challenging Sims 4 experience and they wondered how they could get our toddlers to fulfill both of these needs,
So now I understand Why our Toddlers are cute and challenging lol
