BeyondSims VentureBeat: How Life By You takes a fresh look at life simulation

Rod Humble has sat down to talk with VentureBeat about his upcoming life simulation game, Life By You.

Hot off the announcement trailer we had this time last week, he digs deeper into how this game is different from other games (i.e. The Sims), what makes it unique, and some other fun information!

GamesBeat: What motivated you to go back to this space?

Rod Humble: I’m a life sim player myself. I wanted to work on a game with colleagues where we had a shared vision, really emphasizing freedom. That’s the reason it’s an open world. There are no loading screens. We can directly control people as well as control in third person. You can set up the world the way you want to reflect your community. We want to empower people and have them be free to tell the stories they want to tell. That was really the prime motivation. We want a game that feels free and low-friction to play.

GamesBeat: Was there some technology along the way that helped you accomplish that? Things the older generations of games don’t have?

Humble: It was designed from the ground up. We knew from day one that this was going to be an open world. We knew we were going to let you customize everything. That helped develop the whole game from the start. It would be hard to retrofit this kind of tech into an existing game. Everything assists that. It’s not just an open world in terms of a physical open world. It’s actually simulated simultaneously globally as well.

GamesBeat: Is it more like a city sim as well, then?

Humble: Every person in the world is always being simulated, even when you’re not looking. That’s a key difference for any life simulator. When you see somebody go to work and go into a building, they really go to work. You can follow them there and watch them do their work. You can even swap in between characters. As you go in the world and see anybody, you can right-click on them and play them. You get access to all their memories, all their loves and dislikes, all their social relationships. You can play their life permanently if you want, or just temporarily, and move them around. It’s that easy, rather than having to load up a separate saved game. “I want to play Cecily here,” or whatever her name is. That was the notion. It was allowing the players to play their game their way with as little friction as we could get.

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