Part 1:First Thoughts
Realizing that something was missing from my game and wanting to introduce a little more dramatic conflict into the lives of my sims, I sat down to play one day and soon found myself asking a very significant question.
Who is Sergio Romero?
I was playing the Caldwell family. Specifically, I was playing through the eyes of Stefanie Caldwell, who at that point in the game stood on the brink of young womanhood. Stefanie is a very pretty girl who was “born in game”. Both her mother and father are sims that I created in CAS. They were, in fact, among the first sims I made when Sims 4 was released.
Many of my early sims met and married “townies”, and if you’ve read my forum posts or have been following this simming blog, you already know my feelings about townies. I’ve accepted that many of my sim children have a townie parent, but because Stefanie Caldwell’s parents were both my own creations, that makes her a bit different in my mind. Stefanie Caldwell is special.
As I stepped into the game and slipped into her life, it was a quiet Saturday morning. A high school senior, Stefanie had already completed her homework, and she had the day to herself. Her family is exceptionally wealthy — her mother is the daughter of Arthur Susskind, founder of the TechnoSoft Corporation — and Stefanie enjoys going to the Country Club, AKA as the “Bathe de Ril” in Windenburg.
Upon arriving, she chatted with a friend for a moment and then she was approached by a handsome young man. Sergio Romero.
They struck up a conversation, and it was quite pleasant. Despite the age difference — he was a young adult and she still a teen — they seemed to genuinely like each other.
Being eighteen, Stefanie is always thinking about her future, and always wondering about the man she’ll someday marry. As she chatted with this good-looking fellow, her heart began to flutter a bit. Could this young man, Sergio Romero, be the one for her?
At once, I heard her parents jumping into my head and shouting “No, no, no! He’s not good enough for you, Stefanie!” The reason for this, of course, is that Sergio Romero was a townie. My imagination kicked into gear, and I understood exactly the argument against him that her parents would use. “He’s only after your money,” they would say. “He’s a loser. He’s a nobody.”
Now, some of this thinking might be attributed to the fact I’d just read a mystery titled Deadly Gamble, in which a low-life man ingratiated himself with members of the local country club for fun and profit.
But this was simming. This was my story. And here I was with a character that I didn’t know, a character who had simply walked into the story from nowhere. Who was Sergio Romero? I had no idea.
Of course, he could be anything I wanted him to be. Well, almost anything. He would always be a townie, so I nixed any thought of a relationship between him and Stefanie Caldwell, quickly convincing her that Sergio Romero wasn’t worth her time. After I exited the Caldwell household, however, I began to wonder.
Who is Sergio Romero?
At that point, I realized how useful the townies in my bin could be — if only I knew more about them. I realized, too, how much fun it could be to give each of those townies a real personality. I needed them to be more than a name and a few traits. I needed to flesh them out, to give them back stories, to make them as real as the sims I create in CAS.
That’s how it began. Once the idea took hold, I was off and running on The Townie Project.
READ MORE
The Townie Project – Part 3: Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker?
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