Storytellers, from reading some of your stories I can see how much work goes into storytelling. Building background venues, poses, taking pics, writing, editing, etc. But I'm curious. Do you actually play the game or do you prefer to use it as a vehicle to tell your stories? Do your characters haves careers and aspirations. Do they skill up? Do they sleep and eat? In other words, do they have a life outside of your story?
Edit to add: Or maybe you have different saves for playing and storytelling.
I guess I was just thinking about the most recent pack and wondered if anyone was planning a landlord/tenant scenario or if it's a pack you wouldn't get much use out of. Other than the world and BB/CAS.
Do you actually play the game or do you prefer to use it as a vehicle to tell your stories?
At this point, I've lost interest in gameplay entirely TS4-wise, and it's more or less just a vehicle for storytelling, taking nice pictures, making custom content and building things and just messing about at this point. Sometimes gameplay inspires the story, sometimes with sentiments or popups or whatever but that doesn't happen as much anymore. All of my saves are for the story alone.
As for the For Rent pack, it's not anything I'd get any use out of sadly, but I guess it could work for a gameplay-type story of someone moving out for the first time or something and possibly dealing with a particularly dodgy landlord whilst trying to get ahead in a new job or something.
Do you actually play the game or do you prefer to use it as a vehicle to tell your stories? Do your characters haves careers and aspirations. Do they skill up? Do they sleep and eat? In other words, do they have a life outside of your story?
I play the game, which is not always clear from my legacy posts. My Sims have careers and aspirations. They skill up. They have needs. I have aging on and the non-occult Sims age on a timeline that's very close to the normal setting (I think I added some days to YA, Adult, and Elder). I don't cheat those things, but I don't always write about or focus on them. Career promotions and accomplished aspirations are regularly skipped. I also want my Sims to be unique and for the game to be a little bit challenging, so I limit aspirations for immortal Sims.
My story is the story of their lives. I document what happens with some liberal interpretations here and there.
I do want to incorporate For Rent and play as a landlord, but I probably won't for a long time because I use a lot of mods/CC and don't want to make my save buggy with a buggy pack. There's also not room in my legacy for a landlord story arc right now.
Do you actually play the game or do you prefer to use it as a vehicle to tell your stories?
It's a bit of both. When I started Under The Tartosan Sun it was gameplay driven. Danielle coming out as a lesbian was because of gameplay. Things changed when I staged Danielle and Londyn's wedding. Since then the game is there mostly as a vehicle to tell the story. Schemes and Dreams is different. Gameplay was always less important, but there are times where I get characters together on a lot, usually the Orchid Club, and just let them do what they want and I get screenshots as I go. I want to get back to where Tartosan Sun is more gameplay driven, but my answer to the next question will explain why it probably won't get back to the point it was before 'the wedding'...
Do your characters haves careers and aspirations. Do they skill up? Do they sleep and eat? In other words, do they have a life outside of your story?
All of my characters have jobs and aspirations. In some cases the aspirations are entirely of my own making and played out in my imagination. I don't like the rabbit hole careers, so in the case where a main character has a rabbit hole career like Summer and Matteo who are chefs or Liberty who is a secret agent in Tartosan Sun, I have a mod which allows them to be on vacation indefinitely. When the story requires them to be at work I have lots set up as backdrops and I act out that day at work. I cheat them money every sim week to simulate a paycheck. Danielle is a work from home novelist and she lives off of the royalties from her novels. Once the game stops giving her royalties for a title I add money to her household weekly for those titles. My sims are free to skill up on their own but if I feel like the story requires them to be at a certain skill level I will cheat to bring them up to that level if they aren't already there. I handle all promotions myself based on storytelling needs.
Or maybe you have different saves for playing and storytelling.
I have a main save for both of my stories and at least two backup saves for each. One backup save is a safeguard in case something goes wrong with the main save. The others are for staging special events. For instance I have a side save for Tartosan Sun where the seven main characters are all in one household. That allows me to get them together for special occasions where I need to be able to control everyone to keep them focused on the task at hand. I have another that's just the five women who form 'The Sisterhood', Danielle, Londyn, Summer, Liberty, and Allegra. Anytime they have a 'girls day/night out' I go to that save and play out the events.
I guess I was just thinking about the most recent pack and wondered if anyone was planning a landlord/tenant scenario or if it's a pack you wouldn't get much use out of. Other than the world and BB/CAS.
I have a couple of plans for the new pack. All secondary characters in both stories can now have homes. It bugs me no end when I have supporting characters and I have to delete other characters or make them 'homeless' because all of my lots are already full. I just gained 100 new homes so every character in both stories who has even the slightest chance of coming back for another appearance will have a home until I decide their time in the story is over and I delete them.
The other plan is to make Tomarang the world where Liberty's family came from. Tomarang feels like a Sims Vietnam or Thailand whereas Lee is a Korean or Chinese surname. There is a variation of her surname for countries like Vietnam, Li, that I can possibly spin into her backstory. Or at least it can be a place where she can go to get a bit closer to her heritage until we get a world that's more of direct fit.
Do you actually play the game or do you prefer to use it as a vehicle to tell your stories? Do your characters haves careers and aspirations. Do they skill up? Do they sleep and eat? In other words, do they have a life outside of your story?
For me, it depends. Nowadays the 99% of the time I spend in-game is related either to the preparation or to taking the screenshots I will use for the stories I post, but I both do Simlit based on game challenges (like legacies) and stories purely based on their plot and the answer differs quite a bit for these two cases. In the first case cheating is not allowed and I definitively try to keep my sims' needs high, to level up their skills and careers, and so on. I actually chose to start a legacy when I switched from The Sims 2 to The Sims 4 as a way to explore the new scenarios and gameplay and get used to it before turning again to purely staged Simlit again.
Back with The Sims 2 instead, and also with the next story I'm planning, the role of writing and playing is swapped. If in my legacy I play and then write something based on what happened, in my other stories I start by writing a quite detailed draft of the chapters and then I go in game just to take the screenshots I need to complete it. In this case, I usually cheat to keep the sims needs high, to give them the skill points required to make them do the activity I want to screenshot, use mods to pose them etc... in order to obtain an accurate picture of what I have in mind as quickly as possible.
I guess I was just thinking about the most recent pack and wondered if anyone was planning a landlord/tenant scenario or if it's a pack you wouldn't get much use out of. Other than the world and BB/CAS.
The latest pack is actually something I plan to buy at some point, but more because I plan to take advantage of the apartment lot type more than for playing the landlord/tenant roles. I see it a bit like I see clubs from "Get together", that I also abuse all the time to gather families, friends or just random sims I want to see hanging around that lot.
In particular, the save I'm preparing now and that could become the set for my next story (if I ever take the determination to start it for real) is based on the Harry Potter world and Hogwarts, and is already filled with a lot of original characters I made and several buildings I adapted from the gallery to represent various parts of the castle. As I did with The Sims 2, turning parts of the castle (like the lots containing the dorms) into apartments could actually be quite an easy way to have the common areas always crowded with students, way easier than what I'm doing now with setting club hangouts. And I don't seem to be the only one who seems to be planning to turn Hogwarts into apartments of students either --> https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/comment/18326254#Comment_18326254
Other than this, two of the families of the protagonists are already living in fake apartments, and at least for one of them it could actually be quite nice to turn that lot into a real rental apartment.
I want to see a bit more about how unplayed tenants work anyway, to see if apartments could actually work for what I have in mind before I purchase the expansion. I may wait for a sale too, as expansions are always quite expensive too.
You can follow the Legacy Miller from my blog and the forum thread, *Chapter 8.18 posted on the 23th of April 2024*
Do you actually play the game or do you prefer to use it as a vehicle to tell your stories? Do your characters haves careers and aspirations. Do they skill up? Do they sleep and eat? In other words, do they have a life outside of your story?
I actually play the game since I enjoy the challenges of earning money, managing needs and skilling up for my Sims and I wouldn't cheat anything about it.
And I don't consider myself to be creative enough to come up with a story from scratch, so I quite like it to imagine a story or scenarios based on the prompts the game gives me.
And my Sims sometimes even experience things that don't make it into an episode and I quite enjoy that. It feels rather intimate somehow to watch them in their "private life", lol.
I guess I was just thinking about the most recent pack and wondered if anyone was planning a landlord/tenant scenario or if it's a pack you wouldn't get much use out of.
I actually have some ideas that I would like to play with around renting, but given the current state of the pack I wouldn't dare to do it Not getting paid rent would be a serious problem if the money is intended to be the main income of the household...
And I agree that apartments could also be a nice starting point for a challenge, especially rags to riches. Renting a tiny run down apartment would be so much more realistic than living on an empty lot.
Do you actually play the game or do you prefer to use it as a vehicle to tell your stories? Do your characters haves careers and aspirations. Do they skill up? Do they sleep and eat? In other words, do they have a life outside of your story?
I've been a writer and an artist for way longer than I've been a gamer. And I really don't like games much at all. What's fun for me is coming up with a creative idea and figuring out how to make it come to life. I don't care much for activities that have rules, goals set by someone else, or artificial obstacles that only exist to make the activity harder. So Sims 4 is mostly the only computer game I play, and I don't really play it as a game that much, I instead use it as a creative studio and a box of toys.
Most of my Sims 4 sessions are spent on the story I started posting about a year ago, which is almost entirely planned out and staged according to my own creative ideas. I have currently 14 saves dedicated to that story. The sims involved in that story have whatever needs, wants, or aspirations I want them to have as characters, which mostly have nothing to do with the ones in game. I use cheats and mods constantly to get rid of moodlets or other gameplay aspects that get in the way of my story. Screenshots make heavy use of custom poses and are mostly completely staged. I do use in-game animations and interactions wherever they are useful, but scenes and chapters are shot in whatever order is convenient or inspiring, not in chronological order as they will be read.
Edit to add: Or maybe you have different saves for playing and storytelling.
I do have several saves that are just for playing. But I still use cheats and mods to get rid of a lot of the game-like aspects (such as needing to manage needs etc.) and make it more like just playing with toys instead of playing a game. I also still take a ton of screenshots in those saves. And sometimes I write a bit about them. Because playing with toys, creating art, writing, and using my own imagination without outside things restraining or interrupting me is just what's fun for me. So even when I'm "just playing" I am not really playing the game the way it was intended to be played.
I guess I was just thinking about the most recent pack and wondered if anyone was planning a landlord/tenant scenario or if it's a pack you wouldn't get much use out of. Other than the world and BB/CAS.
I do want the ability to have multiple households living on the same lot (though, more for my playing saves than for my official simlit). The tenant-landlord gameplay isn't something I'm interested in at the moment.
Do you actually play the game or do you prefer to use it as a vehicle to tell your stories? Do your characters haves careers and aspirations. Do they skill up? Do they sleep and eat? In other words, do they have a life outside of your story?
Yes. Most of what I do is gameplay but I steer it in directions that will help the story. I have two other non-simlit game saves but I don't play them much as I'm very invested in the Sim 66 game and don't have a huge amount of time to dedicate to them. The characters have careers and aspirations to achieve and whenever they get a promotion or complete a level in aspiration they get a new outfit. The gameplay is the core and the story fits in around it. As I've read a lot of other simlit stories I've noticed that some writers have forced the game to their storytelling requirements with the amount of detailed custom graphics, skins, textures and after effects; I don't do that apart from cc outfits and furniture. If I went in that direction then it would detach from the Sims 4 game and I like playing it, not just using it for graphic content.
I also don't have all the packs either. I haven't got the rental one yet but there are some old ones which I don't have either (such as laundry day, vampires, werewolves or seasons). I'm not that fussed about being a completionist so I'll get the expansion packs when I feel like it.
Do you actually play the game or do you prefer to use it as a vehicle to tell your stories?
I did start out playing but once I got into writing my Swanson SimLit- it just became a vehicle to tell my story.
Do your characters haves careers and aspirations. Do they skill up? Do they sleep and eat? In other words, do they have a life outside of your story?
They do have careers and aspirations but the careers they don't get until adult years so either after their story has ended (ie they get married and have children) or in one case they had to work as teenagers to pay off a sort of "mortgage" on a payment which has nothing to do with the house. And the aspiration are minor compared to the story. My characters do eat if I'm trying to show them having like a family dinner-I just don't let them sleep unless I need to show them sleeping for story reasons.
Or maybe you have different saves for playing and storytelling.
I have two saves at the moment and both are only for storytelling one is history save for the main save as well something "bad" going on there for something like 73 years. I do have a 3rd save but I'm put that on my thumbdrive just so I don't accidently deleted that (and if I want to play that-I will put the storying telling saves there and move the Disney save back into my save folder)
I guess I was just thinking about the most recent pack and wondered if anyone was planning a landlord/tenant scenario or if it's a pack you wouldn't get much use out of. Other than the world and BB/CAS.
I'm behind on some of the other packs-I just got Grow Together Pack and before that university pack. The next one will be Snowy Espace pack because to me that's the closet one to Korea since Japan and Korea are both in East Asia yeah I know that some Koreans still are upset about Japan but I will take what I can get. So I don't know if I will ever want to get the For Rent pack since except for the rice cooker and the more Asian designs I see no point in getting it.
Do you actually play the game or do you prefer to use it as a vehicle to tell your stories? Or maybe you have different saves for playing and storytelling.
I do play the game sometimes, but only if I have like, an entire day to sink into it. And I love writing, so I'll often prefer to work on my story instead. I have a couple of saves for the Duchelli Legacy, and then several other saves for gameplay. One is a sort of Don Lothario origin story where I aged him down to teen to play through his high school years, one is a WIP save file with makeover of all the premades, and I often start a new save and play for a while and then delete it later, especially to check out the features of a new pack.
I guess I was just thinking about the most recent pack and wondered if anyone was planning a landlord/tenant scenario or if it's a pack you wouldn't get much use out of. Other than the world and BB/CAS.
I haven't had the time and energy to make sure all my mods are updated so I haven't played yet, but I definitely want to try it out and incorporate it in my savefile, there are so many households with roomies and other uses for it. I don't think I'll be playing much with the landlord aspect directly, but it'll be fun to set up the Landgraabs as horrible property owners.
Since we're nearing the end of the year (sorry for my absence and lateness to people's chapters BTW, currently focusing on another game)
What are your New Year's resolutions regarding your SimLit writing / gameplay writing, if you have any?
Mine is to finish Divided. I was hoping to finish it this year, but it ended up longer than I inticipated. X_X And things have only gotten more complicated. There's some things I plan to change due to various factors, and also some written lore that hasn't yet been represented in this story that I need to show, but with any luck I'll finish it next year...I hope. I'm hoping everyone who's currently reading it will enjoy the chapters that come next year and the eventual ending. And with any luck might get new readers if anyone is brave enough to sink into a story that currently has 60+ long chapters. XD
I plan to resume normal chapters in the New Year since the next chapter is depressing and I have a habit of posting depressing chapters at Christmas. : P I do have a New Year's special planned, but it's not a narrative special. Just something cute.
What are your New Year's resolutions regarding your SimLit writing / gameplay writing, if you have any?
I'm going to answer totally instinctively, without thinking too much about it, as today I'm distracted by preparing the long journey I've planned for tomorrow.
My main resolution is to post as much as I can of the translated chapters of the Miller Legacy. I still have about 100 chapters to translate, so arriving to the end could be too much both for me and for you to read, but now that the original version in my language is finished I'm very motivated to reach the ending also in English as soon as possible.
In parallel, so that the Millers don't really need much more gameplay (unless I decide to add even more chapters, but I don't think that the remaining generations will need many of those), I'd like to start preparing in background my following story.
My nickname could have made you suspect something, but if there is one thing I like doing in The Sims at least as much as playing aliens, that's making a Hogwarts-themed save filled with my own sims. I have taken quite a lot of notes already about a possible story in that save could be, on the basis of an older and simpler story I did years ago in TS2. This would also be my first story in TS4 using poses and more powerful mods in general, so it's a challenge I'm very excited to face!
I don't know yet if I will start to post it in parallel to the Millers or if I will wait to finish my first story and then focus totally on the new one, but in any case I think I will take a choice just when the draft of the first section of the story will be backed up on my PC. There is actually a quite good chance that the first chapter won't be posted in the next year yet, that's something I have to consider very carefully.
You can follow the Legacy Miller from my blog and the forum thread, *Chapter 8.18 posted on the 23th of April 2024*
What are your New Year's resolutions regarding your SimLit writing / gameplay writing, if you have any?
New Year's resolution is a big term, but I can definitely subscribe to your resolution. I had also planned to finish Tusnelda and Trix this year. Some of the scenes I have planned and photographed are more than a year old. I am constantly overtaken by the challenges of reality, new packages and butterflies that lead me astray.
A contributing factor to my delay is probably also that I find it difficult to let go of the characters completely, now that I have lived with several of them for three years.
However, there are some limitations in the form I have chosen. For example, I miss the seasons in my game. I have therefore planned the main features for a conclusion of my present story.
I don't have any ideas for a new story yet. Maybe I'll take some of the characters with me to a new Save, or take the starting point in the next generation.
NB: I read your Christmas story about Father Christmas. It was lovely.
@HermioneSims It sounds exciting that you are considering using poses. Are you thinking of creating your own poses?
I'm pretty torn on this myself. I don't think it's something I dare to experiment with, but I will definitely experiment with more mods.
Using poses is a slippery slope. Because then it's finding poses, and then it's rememering which pose pack has what because pose makers rarely label things clearly, sometimes not at all, and then you end up with over 1000+ pose packs... XC It's great fun but really does slow screenshotting down a lot I find. It'd be fun to see if you both do it though!
I understand getting attached to characters too. It'll be kind of sad to leave all of these characters behind once I've done because I've come to adore so many of them.
In any Sims game, Seasons is a must-have for me. Pets packs and the Seasons one. Before I had seasons in TS4 I hated it because it felt like time wasn't passing at all in the long term sense, and I love the autumn and winter in the games < 3
What are your New Year's resolutions regarding your SimLit writing / gameplay writing, if you have any?
My big resolution is to release new material on a regular basis again. For a while I was releasing new chapters every week, alternating between Under The Tartosan Sun and Schemes and Dreams. I stopped posting weekly for a number of reasons, but what started it was feeling the pressure of a weekly deadline. I don't do well with deadlines because I tend to be a bit chaotic in how my creativity and inspiration flows so then I start feeling the deadline 'walls' closing in on me and I end up rushing and forcing things. The problem is now I don't really have any structure so new chapters are being released more randomly. I need to work on finding the happy medium. It's hard to do when you're trying to do two stories at the same time.
I want to break my over reliance on using poses. As @SnowBnuuy said it's a slippery slope and I can say it's doubled or even tripled the amount of time it takes me to do screenshots. That's the second part of what's been causing me to go so long between chapters. I spend way too much time hunting for poses to match the scene in my head as I write instead of using those visions as a rough idea.
Going back to what I mentioned about doing two stories at the same time and what @MonaSolstraale said about getting attached to characters. I've thought about putting one story on hiatus for a period of time and focus on the other, but when I tried to do it I ended up feeling sad for the characters I was putting on the shelf. I can't bring myself to go months on end without seeing my favorites in each story. If spend time with Danielle, Londyn and the rest of the Tartosan Sun cast then I don't get to see Anna, Rayvn, Mimi and the others in Schemes, and vice versa. I can't bring myself to do it. I don't see an end in sight to either story, but if and when the time comes the characters I'm most attached to will be coming with me to be part of a new one. If the stories ended at roughly the same time I might even do a story mixing them together, but they would live on in another story in cameos at the very least.
What are your New Year's resolutions regarding your SimLit writing / gameplay writing, if you have any?
To keep going...I am a bit disappointed that 2023 saw the fewest chapters in Sim 66 uploaded and I want to break 40 chapter/year again, maybe pushing it to 50. That was a combination of poor time planning and writing longer chapters. I also want to keep working on the Cornelius story, which will have a conclusion, but I'm going to write the bulk of it in advance and then publish it in weekly instalments later.
What are your New Year's resolutions regarding your SimLit writing / gameplay writing, if you have any?
To keep going...I am a bit disappointed that 2023 saw the fewest chapters in Sim 66 uploaded and I want to break 40 chapter/year again, maybe pushing it to 50. That was a combination of poor time planning and writing longer chapters. I also want to keep working on the Cornelius story, which will have a conclusion, but I'm going to write the bulk of it in advance and then publish it in weekly instalments later.
i don't even have a chapter so your father along than me.
New Year’s Resolutions… I’m not normally one to set any because I tend to break them and then feel guilty for not sticking to them. Maybe it’s the ADHD in me. I’m terrible at planning stuff in advance.
I’m still a relative newbie to poses and don’t use them all that much. Sometimes finding a pose for a particular screenshot in mind is difficult. Then if I do find a great pose, I sometimes worry whether I’ve taken the screenshot well enough, if that makes sense. Sometimes I take a screenshot and later realise it’s too zoomed out or the angle’s a bit weird.
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Edit to add: Or maybe you have different saves for playing and storytelling.
I guess I was just thinking about the most recent pack and wondered if anyone was planning a landlord/tenant scenario or if it's a pack you wouldn't get much use out of. Other than the world and BB/CAS.
At this point, I've lost interest in gameplay entirely TS4-wise, and it's more or less just a vehicle for storytelling, taking nice pictures, making custom content and building things and just messing about at this point. Sometimes gameplay inspires the story, sometimes with sentiments or popups or whatever but that doesn't happen as much anymore. All of my saves are for the story alone.
As for the For Rent pack, it's not anything I'd get any use out of sadly, but I guess it could work for a gameplay-type story of someone moving out for the first time or something and possibly dealing with a particularly dodgy landlord whilst trying to get ahead in a new job or something.
I play the game, which is not always clear from my legacy posts. My Sims have careers and aspirations. They skill up. They have needs. I have aging on and the non-occult Sims age on a timeline that's very close to the normal setting (I think I added some days to YA, Adult, and Elder). I don't cheat those things, but I don't always write about or focus on them. Career promotions and accomplished aspirations are regularly skipped. I also want my Sims to be unique and for the game to be a little bit challenging, so I limit aspirations for immortal Sims.
My story is the story of their lives. I document what happens with some liberal interpretations here and there.
I do want to incorporate For Rent and play as a landlord, but I probably won't for a long time because I use a lot of mods/CC and don't want to make my save buggy with a buggy pack. There's also not room in my legacy for a landlord story arc right now.
It's a bit of both. When I started Under The Tartosan Sun it was gameplay driven. Danielle coming out as a lesbian was because of gameplay. Things changed when I staged Danielle and Londyn's wedding. Since then the game is there mostly as a vehicle to tell the story. Schemes and Dreams is different. Gameplay was always less important, but there are times where I get characters together on a lot, usually the Orchid Club, and just let them do what they want and I get screenshots as I go. I want to get back to where Tartosan Sun is more gameplay driven, but my answer to the next question will explain why it probably won't get back to the point it was before 'the wedding'...
Do your characters haves careers and aspirations. Do they skill up? Do they sleep and eat? In other words, do they have a life outside of your story?
All of my characters have jobs and aspirations. In some cases the aspirations are entirely of my own making and played out in my imagination. I don't like the rabbit hole careers, so in the case where a main character has a rabbit hole career like Summer and Matteo who are chefs or Liberty who is a secret agent in Tartosan Sun, I have a mod which allows them to be on vacation indefinitely. When the story requires them to be at work I have lots set up as backdrops and I act out that day at work. I cheat them money every sim week to simulate a paycheck. Danielle is a work from home novelist and she lives off of the royalties from her novels. Once the game stops giving her royalties for a title I add money to her household weekly for those titles. My sims are free to skill up on their own but if I feel like the story requires them to be at a certain skill level I will cheat to bring them up to that level if they aren't already there. I handle all promotions myself based on storytelling needs.
Or maybe you have different saves for playing and storytelling.
I have a main save for both of my stories and at least two backup saves for each. One backup save is a safeguard in case something goes wrong with the main save. The others are for staging special events. For instance I have a side save for Tartosan Sun where the seven main characters are all in one household. That allows me to get them together for special occasions where I need to be able to control everyone to keep them focused on the task at hand. I have another that's just the five women who form 'The Sisterhood', Danielle, Londyn, Summer, Liberty, and Allegra. Anytime they have a 'girls day/night out' I go to that save and play out the events.
I guess I was just thinking about the most recent pack and wondered if anyone was planning a landlord/tenant scenario or if it's a pack you wouldn't get much use out of. Other than the world and BB/CAS.
I have a couple of plans for the new pack. All secondary characters in both stories can now have homes. It bugs me no end when I have supporting characters and I have to delete other characters or make them 'homeless' because all of my lots are already full. I just gained 100 new homes so every character in both stories who has even the slightest chance of coming back for another appearance will have a home until I decide their time in the story is over and I delete them.
The other plan is to make Tomarang the world where Liberty's family came from. Tomarang feels like a Sims Vietnam or Thailand whereas Lee is a Korean or Chinese surname. There is a variation of her surname for countries like Vietnam, Li, that I can possibly spin into her backstory. Or at least it can be a place where she can go to get a bit closer to her heritage until we get a world that's more of direct fit.
For me, it depends. Nowadays the 99% of the time I spend in-game is related either to the preparation or to taking the screenshots I will use for the stories I post, but I both do Simlit based on game challenges (like legacies) and stories purely based on their plot and the answer differs quite a bit for these two cases. In the first case cheating is not allowed and I definitively try to keep my sims' needs high, to level up their skills and careers, and so on. I actually chose to start a legacy when I switched from The Sims 2 to The Sims 4 as a way to explore the new scenarios and gameplay and get used to it before turning again to purely staged Simlit again.
Back with The Sims 2 instead, and also with the next story I'm planning, the role of writing and playing is swapped. If in my legacy I play and then write something based on what happened, in my other stories I start by writing a quite detailed draft of the chapters and then I go in game just to take the screenshots I need to complete it. In this case, I usually cheat to keep the sims needs high, to give them the skill points required to make them do the activity I want to screenshot, use mods to pose them etc... in order to obtain an accurate picture of what I have in mind as quickly as possible.
I guess I was just thinking about the most recent pack and wondered if anyone was planning a landlord/tenant scenario or if it's a pack you wouldn't get much use out of. Other than the world and BB/CAS.
The latest pack is actually something I plan to buy at some point, but more because I plan to take advantage of the apartment lot type more than for playing the landlord/tenant roles. I see it a bit like I see clubs from "Get together", that I also abuse all the time to gather families, friends or just random sims I want to see hanging around that lot.
In particular, the save I'm preparing now and that could become the set for my next story (if I ever take the determination to start it for real) is based on the Harry Potter world and Hogwarts, and is already filled with a lot of original characters I made and several buildings I adapted from the gallery to represent various parts of the castle. As I did with The Sims 2, turning parts of the castle (like the lots containing the dorms) into apartments could actually be quite an easy way to have the common areas always crowded with students, way easier than what I'm doing now with setting club hangouts. And I don't seem to be the only one who seems to be planning to turn Hogwarts into apartments of students either --> https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/comment/18326254#Comment_18326254
Other than this, two of the families of the protagonists are already living in fake apartments, and at least for one of them it could actually be quite nice to turn that lot into a real rental apartment.
I want to see a bit more about how unplayed tenants work anyway, to see if apartments could actually work for what I have in mind before I purchase the expansion. I may wait for a sale too, as expansions are always quite expensive too.
Do you actually play the game or do you prefer to use it as a vehicle to tell your stories? Do your characters haves careers and aspirations. Do they skill up? Do they sleep and eat? In other words, do they have a life outside of your story?
I actually play the game since I enjoy the challenges of earning money, managing needs and skilling up for my Sims and I wouldn't cheat anything about it.
And I don't consider myself to be creative enough to come up with a story from scratch, so I quite like it to imagine a story or scenarios based on the prompts the game gives me.
And my Sims sometimes even experience things that don't make it into an episode and I quite enjoy that. It feels rather intimate somehow to watch them in their "private life", lol.
I guess I was just thinking about the most recent pack and wondered if anyone was planning a landlord/tenant scenario or if it's a pack you wouldn't get much use out of.
I actually have some ideas that I would like to play with around renting, but given the current state of the pack I wouldn't dare to do it
And I agree that apartments could also be a nice starting point for a challenge, especially rags to riches. Renting a tiny run down apartment would be so much more realistic than living on an empty lot.
My first attempt at creating a Sims comic: The Parker-Goth Legacy.
I've been a writer and an artist for way longer than I've been a gamer. And I really don't like games much at all. What's fun for me is coming up with a creative idea and figuring out how to make it come to life. I don't care much for activities that have rules, goals set by someone else, or artificial obstacles that only exist to make the activity harder. So Sims 4 is mostly the only computer game I play, and I don't really play it as a game that much, I instead use it as a creative studio and a box of toys.
Most of my Sims 4 sessions are spent on the story I started posting about a year ago, which is almost entirely planned out and staged according to my own creative ideas. I have currently 14 saves dedicated to that story. The sims involved in that story have whatever needs, wants, or aspirations I want them to have as characters, which mostly have nothing to do with the ones in game. I use cheats and mods constantly to get rid of moodlets or other gameplay aspects that get in the way of my story. Screenshots make heavy use of custom poses and are mostly completely staged. I do use in-game animations and interactions wherever they are useful, but scenes and chapters are shot in whatever order is convenient or inspiring, not in chronological order as they will be read.
Edit to add: Or maybe you have different saves for playing and storytelling.
I do have several saves that are just for playing. But I still use cheats and mods to get rid of a lot of the game-like aspects (such as needing to manage needs etc.) and make it more like just playing with toys instead of playing a game. I also still take a ton of screenshots in those saves. And sometimes I write a bit about them. Because playing with toys, creating art, writing, and using my own imagination without outside things restraining or interrupting me is just what's fun for me. So even when I'm "just playing" I am not really playing the game the way it was intended to be played.
I guess I was just thinking about the most recent pack and wondered if anyone was planning a landlord/tenant scenario or if it's a pack you wouldn't get much use out of. Other than the world and BB/CAS.
I do want the ability to have multiple households living on the same lot (though, more for my playing saves than for my official simlit). The tenant-landlord gameplay isn't something I'm interested in at the moment.
Yes. Most of what I do is gameplay but I steer it in directions that will help the story. I have two other non-simlit game saves but I don't play them much as I'm very invested in the Sim 66 game and don't have a huge amount of time to dedicate to them. The characters have careers and aspirations to achieve and whenever they get a promotion or complete a level in aspiration they get a new outfit. The gameplay is the core and the story fits in around it. As I've read a lot of other simlit stories I've noticed that some writers have forced the game to their storytelling requirements with the amount of detailed custom graphics, skins, textures and after effects; I don't do that apart from cc outfits and furniture. If I went in that direction then it would detach from the Sims 4 game and I like playing it, not just using it for graphic content.
I also don't have all the packs either. I haven't got the rental one yet but there are some old ones which I don't have either (such as laundry day, vampires, werewolves or seasons). I'm not that fussed about being a completionist so I'll get the expansion packs when I feel like it.
Read Sim 66 here:https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/978195/sim-66/p1
https://kelloggjkellogg.blogspot.com/2020/10/sim-66-prologue.html
I did start out playing but once I got into writing my Swanson SimLit- it just became a vehicle to tell my story.
Do your characters haves careers and aspirations. Do they skill up? Do they sleep and eat? In other words, do they have a life outside of your story?
They do have careers and aspirations but the careers they don't get until adult years so either after their story has ended (ie they get married and have children) or in one case they had to work as teenagers to pay off a sort of "mortgage" on a payment which has nothing to do with the house. And the aspiration are minor compared to the story. My characters do eat if I'm trying to show them having like a family dinner-I just don't let them sleep unless I need to show them sleeping for story reasons.
Or maybe you have different saves for playing and storytelling.
I have two saves at the moment and both are only for storytelling one is history save for the main save as well something "bad" going on there for something like 73 years. I do have a 3rd save but I'm put that on my thumbdrive just so I don't accidently deleted that (and if I want to play that-I will put the storying telling saves there and move the Disney save back into my save folder)
I guess I was just thinking about the most recent pack and wondered if anyone was planning a landlord/tenant scenario or if it's a pack you wouldn't get much use out of. Other than the world and BB/CAS.
I'm behind on some of the other packs-I just got Grow Together Pack and before that university pack. The next one will be Snowy Espace pack because to me that's the closet one to Korea since Japan and Korea are both in East Asia yeah I know that some Koreans still are upset about Japan but I will take what I can get. So I don't know if I will ever want to get the For Rent pack since except for the rice cooker and the more Asian designs I see no point in getting it.
I do play the game sometimes, but only if I have like, an entire day to sink into it. And I love writing, so I'll often prefer to work on my story instead. I have a couple of saves for the Duchelli Legacy, and then several other saves for gameplay. One is a sort of Don Lothario origin story where I aged him down to teen to play through his high school years, one is a WIP save file with makeover of all the premades, and I often start a new save and play for a while and then delete it later, especially to check out the features of a new pack.
I guess I was just thinking about the most recent pack and wondered if anyone was planning a landlord/tenant scenario or if it's a pack you wouldn't get much use out of. Other than the world and BB/CAS.
I haven't had the time and energy to make sure all my mods are updated so I haven't played yet, but I definitely want to try it out and incorporate it in my savefile, there are so many households with roomies and other uses for it. I don't think I'll be playing much with the landlord aspect directly, but it'll be fun to set up the Landgraabs as horrible property owners.
What are your New Year's resolutions regarding your SimLit writing / gameplay writing, if you have any?
Mine is to finish Divided. I was hoping to finish it this year, but it ended up longer than I inticipated. X_X And things have only gotten more complicated. There's some things I plan to change due to various factors, and also some written lore that hasn't yet been represented in this story that I need to show, but with any luck I'll finish it next year...I hope. I'm hoping everyone who's currently reading it will enjoy the chapters that come next year and the eventual ending. And with any luck might get new readers if anyone is brave enough to sink into a story that currently has 60+ long chapters. XD
I plan to resume normal chapters in the New Year since the next chapter is depressing and I have a habit of posting depressing chapters at Christmas. : P I do have a New Year's special planned, but it's not a narrative special. Just something cute.
I'm going to answer totally instinctively, without thinking too much about it, as today I'm distracted by preparing the long journey I've planned for tomorrow.
My main resolution is to post as much as I can of the translated chapters of the Miller Legacy. I still have about 100 chapters to translate, so arriving to the end could be too much both for me and for you to read, but now that the original version in my language is finished I'm very motivated to reach the ending also in English as soon as possible.
In parallel, so that the Millers don't really need much more gameplay (unless I decide to add even more chapters, but I don't think that the remaining generations will need many of those), I'd like to start preparing in background my following story.
My nickname could have made you suspect something, but if there is one thing I like doing in The Sims at least as much as playing aliens, that's making a Hogwarts-themed save filled with my own sims. I have taken quite a lot of notes already about a possible story in that save could be, on the basis of an older and simpler story I did years ago in TS2. This would also be my first story in TS4 using poses and more powerful mods in general, so it's a challenge I'm very excited to face!
I don't know yet if I will start to post it in parallel to the Millers or if I will wait to finish my first story and then focus totally on the new one, but in any case I think I will take a choice just when the draft of the first section of the story will be backed up on my PC. There is actually a quite good chance that the first chapter won't be posted in the next year yet, that's something I have to consider very carefully.
A contributing factor to my delay is probably also that I find it difficult to let go of the characters completely, now that I have lived with several of them for three years.
However, there are some limitations in the form I have chosen. For example, I miss the seasons in my game. I have therefore planned the main features for a conclusion of my present story.
I don't have any ideas for a new story yet. Maybe I'll take some of the characters with me to a new Save, or take the starting point in the next generation.
NB: I read your Christmas story about Father Christmas. It was lovely.
@HermioneSims It sounds exciting that you are considering using poses. Are you thinking of creating your own poses?
I'm pretty torn on this myself. I don't think it's something I dare to experiment with, but I will definitely experiment with more mods.
Using poses is a slippery slope. Because then it's finding poses, and then it's rememering which pose pack has what because pose makers rarely label things clearly, sometimes not at all, and then you end up with over 1000+ pose packs... XC It's great fun but really does slow screenshotting down a lot I find. It'd be fun to see if you both do it though!
I understand getting attached to characters too. It'll be kind of sad to leave all of these characters behind once I've done because I've come to adore so many of them.
In any Sims game, Seasons is a must-have for me. Pets packs and the Seasons one. Before I had seasons in TS4 I hated it because it felt like time wasn't passing at all in the long term sense, and I love the autumn and winter in the games < 3
My big resolution is to release new material on a regular basis again. For a while I was releasing new chapters every week, alternating between Under The Tartosan Sun and Schemes and Dreams. I stopped posting weekly for a number of reasons, but what started it was feeling the pressure of a weekly deadline. I don't do well with deadlines because I tend to be a bit chaotic in how my creativity and inspiration flows so then I start feeling the deadline 'walls' closing in on me and I end up rushing and forcing things. The problem is now I don't really have any structure so new chapters are being released more randomly. I need to work on finding the happy medium. It's hard to do when you're trying to do two stories at the same time.
I want to break my over reliance on using poses. As @SnowBnuuy said it's a slippery slope and I can say it's doubled or even tripled the amount of time it takes me to do screenshots. That's the second part of what's been causing me to go so long between chapters. I spend way too much time hunting for poses to match the scene in my head as I write instead of using those visions as a rough idea.
Going back to what I mentioned about doing two stories at the same time and what @MonaSolstraale said about getting attached to characters. I've thought about putting one story on hiatus for a period of time and focus on the other, but when I tried to do it I ended up feeling sad for the characters I was putting on the shelf. I can't bring myself to go months on end without seeing my favorites in each story. If spend time with Danielle, Londyn and the rest of the Tartosan Sun cast then I don't get to see Anna, Rayvn, Mimi and the others in Schemes, and vice versa. I can't bring myself to do it. I don't see an end in sight to either story, but if and when the time comes the characters I'm most attached to will be coming with me to be part of a new one. If the stories ended at roughly the same time I might even do a story mixing them together, but they would live on in another story in cameos at the very least.
To keep going...I am a bit disappointed that 2023 saw the fewest chapters in Sim 66 uploaded and I want to break 40 chapter/year again, maybe pushing it to 50. That was a combination of poor time planning and writing longer chapters. I also want to keep working on the Cornelius story, which will have a conclusion, but I'm going to write the bulk of it in advance and then publish it in weekly instalments later.
Read Sim 66 here:https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/978195/sim-66/p1
https://kelloggjkellogg.blogspot.com/2020/10/sim-66-prologue.html
i don't even have a chapter so your father along than me.
My resolution for my upcoming Simlit plans: Don't panic.
That's about it.
I’m still a relative newbie to poses and don’t use them all that much. Sometimes finding a pose for a particular screenshot in mind is difficult. Then if I do find a great pose, I sometimes worry whether I’ve taken the screenshot well enough, if that makes sense. Sometimes I take a screenshot and later realise it’s too zoomed out or the angle’s a bit weird.