The Art of Sims Storytelling
Hi guys! @CathyTea and I were talking, and we thought we'd try making a thread that would be focused solely on writing, especially Sims story writing. The writers' lounge thread is great for being ...
Forum Discussion
"MedleyMisty;14330526" wrote:
Speaking of Surreal Darkness - how does the game influence your work?
A lot, really.
I don't thank EA for much, but I do thank them for making a town and a cast of pre-made sims that could be moulded into deeper characters.
I think a lot of the tone of Eight Cicadas is dictated by its setting. Twinbrook is either kind of mundane and charming, or dark and broken. And I think a lot of the pre-mades there come across that way too. But the town gives me a lot of interesting places to shoot chapters and plan events around. Granted, I'm a sucker for editing lots as I see fit too, but I get a good base to work with most of the time.
As for the pre-mades, they're something that mostly applies earlier on before time marches on and they die. But I have a lot of fun taking a pre-made and fleshing out who they are, whenever I get the chance to do it.
Plus, I think Eight Cicadas would have been a wildly different story if there wasn't a family of criminals for Annette to marry into. The game can't outright say the sort of messed-up horrors that such a family could be hiding, but that's my job! And it's a good job.
"RipuAncestor;14330717" wrote:
What kind of relationship (or whatever you want to call it) is there between the text and pictures in your Sims stories? And yes, you can answer this even if there is no text or no pics in your story as well. That's a relationship too.
Pretty simple: most of the time, text closely follows what happens in the pictures and further describes them. Text fills in the blanks, but I can break form and go for a while with just text, in the event of there being a long dialogue exchange that wouldn't yield that many unique screenshots, or if there's something I really can't portray in the game. I try to keep them at some sort of reasonable length, though.
Text can really tell some things that pictures can't, and vice-versa. Which is why I'm open to reading stories that use just one or the other. A loooooooong time ago, I attempted to do a picture-only story, but I either didn't do it right, or people just didn't understand my artistic vision. :p
