For more than six years Aspyr Studios has been an official member of The Sims™ family. The studio has ported numerous Sims titles to the Mac platform including the original The Sims™, The Sims™ 2 and the numerous expansion packs for each title. Although its astounding IP has sold, and continues to sell, millions of copies around the world, EA felt that the franchise could be taken in a direction that would heighten its appeal to an even greater audience.

“We originally set out to reach the type of players who were intimidated by The Sims,” said Brian Deppiesse, Chief Operating Officer of EA’s The Sims division. “We wanted to reach the users who have low-end machines or did not have a large amount of time to invest in a play session.”

In order to branch The Sims out in this direction, EA set out to find a development partner that had the manpower, technical know-how and strong familiarity with the series. It also needed a team that it could trust with its multi-million-dollar property. As a long-time development partner on The Sims, Aspyr Studios was the logical choice for the development of the new The Sims™ Stories line of games.

“We needed a development team that could take on The Sims and understand its codebase, asset pipleline and unusual gameplay style,” added Deppiessse.

Working closely with The Sims creative team from EA, Aspyr Studios began development on The Sims Life Stories, the first title in EA’s ambitious new story-driven product line that is optimized for laptop computers and lower-end PCs.

As the first product to be developed using The Sims 2 engine by a third-party studio, some of the first obstacles to overcome involved establishing effective lines of communication and efficient processes. Each side had to overcome initial growing pains.

On the technical side, the development staff faced the task of ramping up on three million lines of unfamiliar code and EA proprietary dev tools in only a few months. In addition, there were many hurdles to overcome in order to create a game based on The Sims 2 engine that would run well on laptop PCs and older or lower-end machines, which normally feature low RAM and older processors and video cards.

The laptop platform alone raises many unique issues. Different manufacturers often alter the speed of various hardware elements (CPU, video card, sound card, etc.) to improve performance or battery life. This creates large inconsistencies across the various hardware and Aspyr Studios had to accommodate hundreds of configurations. Another major issue is video card drivers, which need to be updated by the laptop manufacturer. Often these manufacturers do not bother to do this for older models, which means that someone who bought a laptop 18 months ago may not have access to the latest drivers needed to play The Sims Life Stories.

Aspyr and EA quickly worked together to close the communication gaps and establish processes that would optimize the budget and limited timeframe. The two teams spent time at each other’s offices to learn more about the team structures, and then hammered out processes accordingly. Aspyr streamlined the efforts by assigning a veteran producer to be the dedicated main point of contact for EA and by utilizing the strengths of its seasoned leadership.

In order for the project to be a success, Aspyr Studios had to take The Sims 2’s complicated engine and create The Sims Life Stories in such a way that it would run well on laptops and lower-end PCs. This required a lot of experimentation, and in a very short amount of time in order to meet the tight deadlines.

The team profiled the game’s CPU and memory use in a variety of cases (such as one Sim on a blank lot, eight Sims on a large lot, etc.) in order to see where the biggest bottleneck was on the target platforms. While The Sims 2 code is very well optimized it was found that the sheer amount of data it has to process slows down lower-end machines. In order to make the game run well on slower PCs data would have to be cut. Higher resolution textures, sound variations and objects had to be cut from the game, sometimes by hand, and sometimes by tools that were created in-house to automate removing the thousands of assets required. Each time cuts were made Aspyr Studios re-profiled the game until it ran at the target performance.

Once optimum performance was achieved, the programmers needed to dive headfirst into the millions of lines of code. The Sims 2 engine was designed for a game that allows players to do whatever it is they want. The Sims Life Stories is a directed, story driven gameplay experience and Aspyr Studios needed to implement features and concepts that had not been used with this technology before. With the invaluable help of EA’s engineers, Aspyr’s programmers quickly became familiar with the code and, within a few months of beginning work, were able to quickly and easily implement all of the new features of The Sims Life Stories.

Aspyr Studios delivered a fun title that wowed the licensor and became a fast success, landing in the top five of the PC sales charts in its first weeks on store shelves. Aspyr Studios proved its worth by managing one of the most valuable properties in video games and set the stage for an entire series based on The Sims IP. With all of the lessons learned from creating The Sims Life Stories, the studio gained the experience to make each successive Sims Stories title better and more robust than the previous.