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First
of all, Normalville started out with an arid landscape - you'll notice
this in some of the screenshots. I eventually changed it to lush because
it fit the place that had by then grown in my imagination better (for
even more details how and why I created Normalville, check the Author's
Notes, once I get around to writing them).
Here is the oldest overview screenshot of Normalville that I have (circa
the time when the generation 3 was growing into teenhood, right after
the terrain was changed):
On to the families:
First of all, as you can tell by the last names I give the families
I create: I intentionally go for stereotypes, at least when I'm creating
the family. But I am fairly sure readers realize that I'm not necessarily
posting about my own values here. *g*
Normalville was created to be mostly white, and rather oldfashioned
- or maybe traditional is a better word. While there had been some darker-skinned
sims from the beginning, the lighter-skinned inhabitants have never
quite warmed up to them. Mind you, they're even worse about the green
aliens, what with their perverted origins. And while the blue-skinned
alien offspring I introduced right at the beginning are doing fairly
well, they're doing that by flying below the radar. They all don't exist,
officially.
When I decided to import quite a few Maxis families ("Maxisville"),
I plopped them down at a different corner of the neighborhood and considered
them to be a neighboring town with very different values: much more
equal when it comes to skintones, so much so that even green-skinned
aliens were maybe not universally accepted, but were mostly considered
'weird', not 'inferior'. They're still considered a seperate town, but
a recent catastrophe (also known as "player's whim" *g*) has forced
them to move in with each other, limiting them to 3 - huge - families.
Eventually, Normalville and Maxisville will interact and intermarry
- I think I can keep them mostly apart when I start to match up the
current (5th) generation, but after that, they'll have to intermarry
to widen the gene pool. I will probably move their houses to Downtown
when I get back to playing normally after I'm done with the story rewriting,
to make the seperation more clear.
What hasn't shown up yet, but what I have been doing with Bluewater
Village (= the shopping district) is to take all the sims I'd discontinued
playing in my main game, and re-added them. It was mostly Maxis sims
I'd discarded (Nina Caliente, Mary-Sue Pleasant, Ripp Grunt, etc), some
Normalville Romance sims, and with the inhabitants that come with BV,
I've created another subtown. This one is quite small, tho, and will
have to merge with main Normalville soon-ish.
I do have a political spectrum inside Normalville, and generally know
if a particular family is more liberal (the Cheaters, Brokes, Nordics,
for example) or conservative (the Breeders, most notably, but also the
Strict or the Normals, depending on the generation). I also make sure
that top career levels are only in use once: there's only one mayor,
chief of police and Captain Hero or chief of hospital staff. There's
religion, but I've left it as an unspecified Christianty-based one.
The attitudes towards sex also range from conservative to liberal, which
means that some families will heavily frown upon or even activly act
against those who are homosexual, while others will be much more accepting.
Again, Maxisville is much more accepting.
University attendance is limited: a sim has to be Knowledge, Fortune
or Popularity, *and* good enough grades/enough money - although granted,
occasional exceptions happen.
Just before NL came out, gave in to the fact that Normalville had become
too glitchy to play, and recreated the whole neighborhood: I cloned
everyone, used CAS to get them into the game, and then did a lot of
editing with SimPe and the InSiminator to get everything working again.
I did lose some of the recessive genes, but overall, this worked well.
I did put everyone back into their old homes, but I used to opportunity
to refurnish nearly all of them. And since then, I've been slowly re-building
houses to be more to my liking, so please overlook the occasional sudden
transformation of livingspace in the pictures.
I don't normally script events - most of the storylines at least start
out naturally. Granted, now that I've been playing for a long time,
I'm much more likely to get an idea from something that happens and
actually do an elaborate set-up, but my main playing style is just that:
simply playing the game.
One last thing: I'm prefectly aware that generation 3 got totally out
of hand: not only did I have tons of kids running around, I also imported
the Maxis families. I am actively working on limiting the number of
sims in play, so that gen 4 and 5 will only be allowed one offspring.
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