Text/Liang Lotte

In the industry, it is a common practice to launch micro-innovative products based on market-proven categories.

But if you want to ask which category has never been successfully copied, life simulation games are undoubtedly one of them. Because in this area there is only one series of "The Sims", and the four games under the series.

Since the inception of The Sims in 2000, the series has defined the life simulation genre through four generations of titles with its highly free gameplay and huge player ecosystem, achieving the achievement of "game as a category". In 2019, EA's CEO Andrew Wilson announced that the cumulative global revenue of the Sims series exceeded $5 billion (about 36.2 billion yuan).

It's not that no one wants to eat this $5 billion piece of fat, but that you can see it, but you can't touch it. Competing products such as "Paralives" and "Afterlives" are still in the early stages of development; P's "Life By You" announced in June this year that it would be postponed indefinitely; According to overseas media reports, even EA itself has canceled the development plan of "The Sims 5" and refocused the team's energy on "The Sims 4".

But Krafton doesn't seem to believe in this evil.

When it comes to South Korea's Krafton company, I believe that everyone is most familiar with its phenomenal hit "PUBG".

At the end of 2021, the game's PC and console versions had sold more than 75 million copies worldwide; As of this writing, according to SteamDB statistics, the game is still firmly in the top three in terms of the number of online players on Steam; According to the company's 2023 financial report, the work also set a record high in monthly revenue in December last year.

In November 2023, they exposed the life simulation game "inZOI" for the first time at the G-STAR Game Show in South Korea. In the face of this news, most people may be confused. After all, the span from eating chicken to Sims is also too big.

While surprised, I'm guessing you're probably curious: what is the background of the development team? Why did they make a life simulation game? And how did they convince the company to support the project? With these questions in mind, I had a conversation with Kim Hyung-joon, the producer and director of "inZOI".

He told me that he has been in the game industry for 24 years and has spent most of his time developing MMORPGs; He is an avid fan of the Sims series, hoping to use the next-gen engine to provide players with options outside of the Sims series; The company was initially reluctant to develop the game, but it wasn't until it received positive feedback from players that it decided to fully support the project.

The following is a conversation between Grape Jun and Kim Hyung-joon, adjusted for ease of reading:

01

24 years of experience

Grape: Can you briefly introduce your work experience?

Kim Hyung-joon: I majored in art at school, and after graduating, I entered the game industry. At that time, games were still stored on floppy disks; In the blink of an eye, I've been working in game development for 24 years, and during that time, I've been working as an MMORPG producer for a long time.

Kim Hyung-joon drew his school days

and the floppy disks he used when he entered the gaming industry

Grape: You haven't done a life simulation game before. Why did you come up with the idea of making a game like this?

Kim Hyung-joon: There are two reasons for this. For one, I've been playing the Sims series for almost 10 years and can be said to be a big fan of the series. Coupled with the fact that I'm an art major, I think it's a fun experience for players to be involved in the creation of game content and share their work with others.

Second, this type of game is rare in the world. It would make sense to me if I could take advantage of new technology and make a life simulation game that gives players new options beyond the Sims series.

Kim Hyung-joon's career experience

Grape: This is from a personal point of view. From a company's point of view, how did you convince the company to agree to the development?

Kim Hyung-joon: Essentially, they were worried about only two questions: Can we make this kind of game? Can it be successful? The most direct way to solve these two problems is to complete the development of the game and test it in the shortest possible time.

Therefore, I promised the company that I would make the game within 6 months. This commitment succeeded in convincing the company's leadership. Eventually, I did finish the beta version within the 6-month deadline and submitted it to the company.

But after testing, the company was still unsure if the game would be a success in the market.

Therefore, we decided to give the demo version of the game to the influencers for testing and bring the game to the show to decide whether to make the game further based on the feedback from the players. That's the backdrop for inZOI's premiere at G-STAR last year. In the end, the game received positive feedback, which strengthened our confidence to continue development.

Grape Jun: What is the specific positive feedback?

Kim Hyung-joon: First of all, the most mentioned point by players is that there are finally other life simulation games outside of the Sims series.

Secondly, they are more satisfied with the realistic painting style. This was something I didn't expect, because there were a lot of people in the house who were opposed to using a realistic style of painting.

Finally, in the game, players are encouraged to do good deeds and punished for bad deeds. Testers have also responded positively to this mechanism of good and evil values.

02

Tracks without references

Grape King: How many people are in the team now? Do any members of the team have experience in life simulation game development?

Kim Hyung-joon: In the early stage of development, the team only had about 40 people; After that, it remained at 40~60 people for almost a year; After seeing the good response from the market, the team has expanded to about 120 people.

Almost no one on our team had similar development experience. I think there are two reasons for this.

One is that there are relatively few people with similar experience, and it is not easy to recruit.

Usually, before developing a certain type of game, we look at the system of the same type of game and consider the technical implementation. But the situation of life simulation games is more special, because in this world, apart from the Sims series, it can be said that there is no other work; And The Sims 4 is already a game from 10 years ago. In my opinion, this is the most challenging part of the development process.

I met a Sims 4 developer earlier, and after greeting each other, he said to me: Good work, come on. From this, it can also be seen that there are very few people engaged in this type of game development in this world.

Of course, this situation led to problems in the development process. If your team members are all experienced and you make a request, they will usually be able to understand your intent accurately and produce content that meets expectations. However, when team members are new to this type of game development, misunderstandings often arise during the communication process.

In addition, with no other similar games to look at, team members often fall into self-doubt, confusion, and uncertainty about whether their design is going in the right direction and whether players will like it.

The second is that even if we were able to recruit developers for the Sims series, we were skeptical that we would be able to get a good result if we were to develop exactly the Sims series.

We looked at the code for the Sims series. In my opinion, they are not particularly good at this. On the contrary, you can feel that they went through a lot of trial and error during the development process before finally succeeding in making the game. One of the programmers in The Sims told me that when they first developed the series, they even considered making it an online game.

While we did refer to the Sims series in some aspects during the development of inZOI, for the most part, we relied on our own attempts to work our way up the original development.

Grape: You just said that the Sims originally wanted to be an online game. Is inZOI purely a single-player game or an online game?

Kim Hyung-joon: We're developing it completely as a single-player game now.

To be honest, this type of game really doesn't match the online gameplay. Because at the heart of the game, it's up to the player to create a world of their own. In multiplayer mode, the addition of other players may cause disturbance to the world. This kind of play may not be to the liking of most players.

Long after the game is live, we may try to add multiplayer, such as allowing players to create rooms in the game, invite friends to join, and interact with them.

Grape Jun: In terms of specific gameplay, I think the customization system is more important for life simulation games. So, did the team have a hard time developing a custom system for characters and buildings?

Kim Hyung-joon: I've done a lot of MMORPGs, and these projects are the first games in Korea to add custom features to MMORPGs.

While the character and building customization systems in these games aren't as complex as in inZOI, the development process for these systems has been relatively smooth thanks to our previous experience.

Currently, players can take advantage of more than 250 customization options to adjust their characters, including hairstyle, shirt length, nails, age, body type, and other aspects during character creation.

Grape King: MOD should be considered another important feature of life simulation games. The player ecology represented by it can be said to be one of the moats of the Sims series. How does inZOI think about cultivating a player ecosystem?

Kim Hyung-joon: One of the more frustrating things for developers of this type of game is that once players experience the new content, it basically loses its freshness. If players feel like there is no new challenge, they will leave the game. So we're adding as many systems and resources as we can.

Based on this, games like inZOI pay more attention to the UGC ecosystem than other products. In response, we plan to sign up with mod hosting platforms like CurseForge, which will allow players to process and share their own creative content through these platforms.

Grape: Compared to the Sims series, will inZOI, which is based on Unreal Engine 5, be more difficult to mod?

Kim Hyung-joon: We are preparing a mod creation function based on the Unreal Editor, and we are planning to develop our own software plug-in for Unreal so that players can create art assets.

In the case of character costume design, for example, the Unreal Editor provides a crafting space similar to the game environment, allowing players to create mods in a frame that is close to the final result.

Grape Jun: The minimum graphics card requirement for inZONI is RTX 2060, does this mean that the game is difficult to optimize?

Kim Hyung-joon: The team is currently working on optimizing the game so that it can run in a low-spec environment.

However, our goal is not to make the game run in a low-spec environment, but to ensure that the overall image quality of the game is not affected too much while maintaining low configuration requirements.

The game is played on RTX 2060 and RTX 4080

Grape: In your opinion, what are the advantages of inZOI compared to the Sims series?

Kim Hyung-joon: First of all, "inZOI" is a next-generation picture quality.

Second, we simulated elements such as people and vehicles in the city to build a more realistic city. In the early days of inZOI's development, the simulation was limited to the interior of the house. In order to bring a new experience to players, we realized that we needed to expand more space, especially to create wide, seamless streets.

The crowds that gather on these streets should have their own stories. For example, when a crowd of people meet on the street, they may get into an argument; And there will be friendly interactions between familiar people.

Third, in the Sims series, players need to use professional software outside the game to make character and scene mods; But we want players to be able to create these things in-game.

To simplify this process, we've introduced image generation AI to help players create and customize their favorite characters in the game. In addition, the game also supports 3D printing, which allows players to import local images to generate the ideal character.

Recently, we are also developing AI that generates character movements by importing videos.

Grape: What is the current development progress of the game, and when is it going to be launched?

Kim Hyung-joon: At the moment, the progress is relatively smooth. We're ready to launch Early Access in March next year.

The Sims 4 has been in operation for almost 10 years, and our game has been in development for less than 2 years. Even if we extend the development time to 3 or 5 years, we may not be able to completely close the gap with them. There is no fixed end to this kind of game, and there is no limit. That's why we decided to get the game live first, and then tweak and optimize it based on player feedback.

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