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SimAnimals Executive Producer Interview

Published By: Tristan Clark On: 25/09/2008 10:00

Wild animals at your fingertips.

We sat down with Sam Player, executive producer of the forthcoming SimAnimals for Wii and DS, at this year’s GCA conference in Singapore. Read on to find out how to befriend animals, destroy beaver dams, and more!

The interface:

Sam: The controller is more than just a pointer – it’s a 3D being in the world. The animals can see it and interact with it. If I put it to close to a sleeping bear, for example, it’ll grab it and toss it away if you’re not friendly.

Everything in the world can be grabbed – so you can move flowers, trees, and animals around wherever you like.

The aim of the game:

Sam: The whole forest is divided into 11 sections, and they’re unlocked one at a time. They’re unlocked by a general happiness bar at the top of the screen. Everything within your section has a happiness rating, from the animals to the trees. Once everything is happy enough overall, you can progress onto the next area.

Goals:

Sam: This is a Sims game, so you can do anything you want. But we found that Sims players like direction to stop things from being overwhelming, so we’ve got a series of small goals. These goals are completely optional – you don’t need them to play a game, but they’ll help out a lot of people.

So one goal is to simply feed berries to a bear. You need to find a berry bush, grab a berry, and drop it on front of the bear. Another goal is helping convince a beaver to make its home here. It’ll want to build a dam, so you need to help it get wood from a tree.

But that’s not a good idea if there are other hostile animals around. Animals are only going to do tasks like build a home if they feel safe – so make sure you reposition bears and other creatures first!

There are consequences for a lot of actions. Once the beaver has built his dam, for example, the river is naturally blocked. This causes a lake to form on one side of the dam, flooding anything nearby. And the water supply is cut off from anything downstream.

Luckily, you can stick anything in your backpack, including water. You can pick water up, and deposit it on anything else in the game to help it grow.

Or if you wanted, you can just destroy the dam! But then the beaver might very well go ahead and rebuild it.

The animals:

Sam: Animals have five different needs. They need to be fed, have shelter, have friends, have fun, and they need to feel safe. You can also rename all the animals in the game.

We’re going to have more than 30 different animals, and more than 60 different species of plants.

Eating habits:

Sam: The overall arching goal is to discover what plants animals like, so they can be sustained, and so they come to live in your area and thrive. And then they won’t eat other animals as much, which – yes – can happen in SimAnimals.

Fighting will occur. There is a predator/prey relationship between some animals. But this is a kid’s game, so you won’t see biting or mauling – there’ll be a cloud of dust when animals fight, and the loser will disappear.

Mating will happen in a similar way – animals will just rub noses and offspring will appear. We’re not trying to teach biology to kids!

Multiplayer:

Sam: Up to four Wii remotes can be plugged in, which lets all the players muck around in the forest. It will get chaotic with everyone grabbing stuff, but it’s fun.

Your relationships to all the animals are tied to your Mii. So if a bear likes your Mii, but doesn’t like your friend’s, he’ll be friendly to you but hostile to them!

The game has been in development for about nine months – although more like a year since the concept was floated. It ships in January, so the team is going to be very busy between now and then. Keep an eye out in the coming months for more info on SimAnimals, and a full review in 2009!