Coded green.

Monday 30 October 2006

Screenshot Sims2 Pets

Pic of the day: PawPrince does karaoke. I haven't decided on whether this goes into the novel yet...

NaNoSimming

I'm not the only one to do this, or so I read. Actually I have a more relaxed attitude to it than some others. But yeah, I have created my NaNoWriMo characters in The Sims 2 and played around with them. With the timely arrival of Sims2 Pets, it became possible to also include the cat. I have taken numerous screen shots of the characters, as a help for myself and for my visual collaborator.

Right, I haven't mentioned that here. I asked on LiveJournal for someone to make a front page for my book. An old friend is willing to try. I am a bit nervous about it as she does not have experience with that kind of composition before, but her half-anime style would fit well with my writing, if she could be a little less intense or solid on the colors. We shall have to see. But at least she now has a good idea how the characters look like on their own and when interacting with each other.

Some people mainly use Sims2 to create the house in which their novel takes place. It is always disconcerting for the more brainy reader to go through a novel and find that the bedroom moves from one floor to the next and the kitchen is sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right, and evidently all rooms have doors to all other rooms. To avoid this, and to pad out their novel with pointless descriptions of the surroundings, people can construct their house in Sims2. When running the game, you also get a test as to how it functions in practice. Forgot to put in stairs between the ground floor and the first floor? Oops, your Sims will never be able to get up there. Back to the drawing board! Or rather to Sims2 build mode.

Unless you already have the characters clearly fastened in your mind (or have muses in your head with flypaper memory) it might also help to create them in Sims2. That way their eye color won't change from one chapter to the next (unless they get colored contacts, I guess...) and you can always pad your story with casual references to their shoulder- length brown hair or thin lips.

Sims2 also has a good selection of clothes, and there are thousands more to be downloaded (most of them for free). So you can dress up your Sims in new clothes each day if you will, and see at a glance what fits their character and what not. For instance, Kurt (my male Main Character) is a serious, introverted person with black hair. Simple, black and gray clothes fit him. Colorful or overly classy clothes would look out of characters on him. Of course, the muses in my head already knew this, so I did not really need that for myself. For my illustrating friend however it may be nice to know. Likewise Bodil, the overly energetic girl friend, tends to wear semi-boyish clothes most of the time. She also exposes more skin than average on arms and legs due to her fast metabolism that always keeps her warm. These things are very easy to make visible with Sims2.

Now the only thing I need to worry about is to stop playing long enough to write the novel! ^_^;


Yesterday <-- This month --> Tomorrow?
One year ago: Fast forward
Two years ago: CoH Halloween event
Three years ago: New growth in the USA?
Four years ago: Bracing for NaNoWriMo
Five years ago: More civilization
Six years ago: The son and the father
Seven years ago: Washing day

Visit the archive page for the older diaries I've put out to pasture.


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