Games

Strange things are afoot in your Sims’ household. Mom doesn’t quite seem herself today. Junior’s been fiddling with the occult. Grandpa’s building something strange in his basement laboratory. And Dad’s having dinner with Uncle Harry who’s been dead for ten years.

Provide a little ghostly excitement and get your Sims spooked!

Sims 2 Spooked! is a Sims 2 expansion pack created by students in CTIN 489 in Spring 2005.

The course was (and still is) sponsored by Maxis – producers of The Sims, Sim City, and other hit titles. Students worked in cross-disciplinary teams using Maxis’s Edith object-oriented programming environment as a design and engineering tool. The class exposed students to advanced concepts in game design, story telling, and Sims 2 object production. Students received heavy exposure to Maxis team leaders and learned team collaboration, digital prototyping, interface design, user testing, hands-on QA, and how to generate a final “build” as practiced in industry.

Students had to complete three Introductory projects and one Final project. Each project used the Sims 2 Edith scripting environment and other Sims 2 tools. Those tools were chosen because they allow rapid prototyping and development of sophisticated concepts in the form of Sims 2 Objects. The playability and technical soundness of Objects can be easily shared and tested.

In the three Introductory projects students worked in teams of 3-4 to create simple Objects that created some form of emergent gameplay. These early projects allowed students to learn how Edith works.

In the Final project students coordinated as one big twenty-two person team to create their own Sims 2 Expansion pack. This became Sims 2 Spooked!

Sims 2 Spooked! is a set of twenty sophisticated Objects built around the central theme of “Sims get paranormal”. The class generated the concept, the title, and all the content. They received feedback and suggestions from the course instructors and an amazing set of mentors from Maxis.

During production of Spooked! the class organized into sub-teams which each included both artists and programmers. The scope of each sub-team’s assignment was custom-tailored to the abilities of that particular set of students. Some assignments were more technically demanding and some were more demanding in terms of the media that needed to be produced. The goal of the course instructors was to be adaptive and flexible in regard to student abilities in order to get the best creative output from the entire class.

At the end of the project students who had programming skills focused on coding the objects. Students with design skills created presentation materials including: a spooky house and characters, a video trailer, a product package, and a detailed book detailing all objects in the expansion pack.

The final playable objects and non-player characters in Sims 2 Spooked! are:
• Possessed Coffee Pot
• Haunted Paintings
• Levitating Objects
• Voodoo Doll and Witch Doctor
• Possessed Toilet
• The Doppleganger Mirror
• Severed Head in a Jar
• Paranormal Meter
• Indoor Thunderstorms
• Ghost Maid
• Auto Levitator
• Possessed Sink
• Frank – the Do It Yourself Monster Kit
• The Bloodening
• The Graveyard
• Portrait of Dorian Gray
• Misc Laboratory Contraptions
• Moody Piano
• Ghostbusters
• The Smmith Family – Raul, Martina, Fugley, Boyle, J.R, Friday, Grandpa

Each object is playable in the Sims 2 meaning it has its own code, interactions, animations, and sound. All objects packaged together make a full Sims 2 Expansion pack.

USC thanks EA/Maxis for the opportunity to create Sims 2 Spooked!