The Sims 3: Rod Humble - Part Two

It did come up during development, and as always we just favoured... if there's one mantra we've got in the studio it's: "If you can build a tool that puts us out of business, do it and put it in the game."

That bet has never, ever let us down - because what happens is, players love making stuff, and they will make thousands of objects, and share them, and yet they'll always want stuff that's built by us. So far the bet has paid off, and I think that'll pay off again.

But part of what players want is more creativity options - they want to be able to do this stuff. So - put ourselves out of business? Great. All that means is that we can then figure out different ways of putting stuff in the expansion packs, and different editors out there.

When it comes to the colour patterns, by the way, if you look there's an option that can pick colours that match each other. That algorithm blew me away... that was one of the most disturbing and wonderful moments in The Sims 3 development - one of our programmers found this algorithm in the public domain, and tweaked it, and it actually simulates taste!

So before, you'd pick a colour and you'd match it... and it would look awful. With that algorithm, turn it on and it actually makes colours that match the colour you picked. I just find that disturbing, that it can identify those colours that are tasteful to the human eye - I wanted to put that under the 'free will' part of the human mind, and I find it extremely disturbing that it works... I pass on to you that nagging fear and dread that perhaps computers can do more than we thought they could...!

We deliberately, in The Sims 3, added a large amount of RPG-feeling depth to the career path, the moodlets and the career goals. But also, we kept with our philosophy that if there's a challenge in any Sims game, then we make sure we include the ability to skip it.

So all of that depth is there for players who want it, but we also make sure there are cheats in there that give you infinite money, or put you to the top of the career ladder any time you want it. We actually publish those when we launch, so that people don't get frustrated.

That's just part of our philosophy - people will generally choose to have a challenge, but we never want to force them to have a challenge. I've seen that myself, with my wife - she loves racing games, so when I buy her a game that, let's say has a Ferrari on the front of it, she can't understand why she has to start off in the Fiat to begin with and work her way up. She's like, "What?! I don't want to drive a Fiat, I've got the game so I can drive the Ferrari."

So in The Sims, if you don't want to have to earn the money, just type in a cheat and you can get it all. We would hate to have people frustrated.

But yeah, we did add a lot of depth to the gameplay, for people - like myself - who just love that element of tweaking your way up the career ladder.

I've got a bunch, but one of the ones that comes to mind - I was beta-testing Open for Business, and I was playing a family. Both parents went to work, and one of the kids had gone to school, but the teenager was left at home. I suddenly thought of something and wondered if it was possible, and sure enough - I bought the cash register and the kid ran a business where he sold all of the parents' furniture while they were at work. Then, when they came back, he'd use that money to buy himself a brand new toy.

I thought, "You know what, if a game can do that... then we're in great shape." It was one of those wonderful moments - I didn't expect it, and we didn't design it, but it actually worked, so it was kinda cool.