katrisims | BTS for Bookacy Interlude 1 and Villains or Heroes Prologue (Reply)

Vaddi bobo! Time to finally talk about the Sekrit Project, because it's no longer sekrit! Beware of spoilers under the cut if you haven't read the Bookacy interlude or the Prologue to Villains or Heroes? yet.

I almost could have named this whole project "Because Sal refuses to stay in the background". Perhaps the actual title is a bit better, though.

Let's start with "How did this whole thing come into existence in the first place?" Well, as you might remember, I had been thinking about having a side project for quite a while. There are times when I'm a bit stuck with the Bookacies, or am disallowing myself from playing them because I need to write, or whatever. That was one reason I was considering it. Another one is the one I've been mentioning a lot: the Bookacies are an alphabetacy, and that alone makes it a rather long project. On top of that, I play the whole hood, which makes it even longer. Since there are other things I want to do with my game, I realized that if I ever want to get them done, I'd better get to them while I play the Bookacies, because otherwise I can literally die of old age without ever getting to those other things.

Now,

esmeiolanthe wisely suggested that I could start another challenge in Alphabetia. After all, I do play the whole hood anyway, so it'd be a two birds with one stone situation. I quite liked that idea, and in fact, maybe I will yet do that. After all, I would like to do a regular 10-gen legacy with the new rules (I've only played by old rules earlier), perhaps an OWBC... So why didn't I go by that advice now? Well, first of all, there was Plot. The idea just struck me in the summer (yes, it did take me this long), and after a lot of hesitation, I decided it was too good to pass up on. Second of all, in order to start a new challenge in Alphabetia, I'd have to wait until gen. D become adults or at least young adults, so that would have meant I need to be Patient. Which I'm sometimes not. ;) I wanted a side project Now. An apocalypse has definitely been on my list of things I want to do, and the plot idea fit that very well, so... That's how it happened.

An apocalypse, alongside with a BaCC, was just about the only thing on my list that I couldn't do in Alphabetia. But oh well, I thought. I realized that in an apocalypse hood, I wouldn't really feel very tempted to play All The Things, because it'd feel odd to not go by the rules in other households, and I think one household with Crazy Restrictions is quite enough, thank you very much. So in the end, I decided to go by a strict "no playing other households" -rule and go for it. It wouldn't add that much of playing, not compared to what I do in Alphabetia.

So, because I love Sal and he won't stay in the background, I came up with the plot to have him dream an alternative universe where the apocalypse would happen. After all, he's going to be locked up for three "lifetimes", you guessed it, roughly three generations. He's going to have plenty of time to dream in the near future. So having him step aside in Alphabetia was convienient for my purposes here. I do realize that sticking your villain into an apocalypse is by no means a hugely original idea at this point, but hey, what you gonna do, other than do it anyway? I fully confess to a recursive idea theft here.

The interlude

Before I get too far, let's talk about the interlude a bit.

I knew that Sal would be in jail for a longish time, and I might need to shoot pictures of him there. Which I already now needed to do, to get the interlude done - and in fact, to show that he's in jail in the first place. The pictures in the interlude were pretty basic, but what I needed was a location. So I went downloading some prison-related stuff, and built one. I got a bit carried away with it, but in the end, it's pretty cool that I have a jail. Sal actually lives there, by the way, and Komei is holding the fort at his lair. Let's take a little tour.

First, the corridor with the cells.

Each individual cell is like this. (I think there are eight.) A bunk, a toilet, a cheap lamp and a chair. The toilet is a bit too fancy for prison, but it was the only on-wall one that I had, so it had to do. ... and now that I told you that, you noticed. Oops.

Contrary to what I say in the interlude, Sal does actually have a coffin. I haven't really invented a force field that would keep him from frying. :) It's just dumped on the corridor.

The guards have an office of sorts, even if it didn't get shown. You never know when you might need it, right?

Just as a detail, I figured that the computers in a prison would be way outdated. (The guards have one, and there's one in the library.) And I totally get a kick out of the computer being extracted from Portal 2. (You can just about see the Aperture logo.)

Guards' break room.

The big hall where the mealtimes are.

The gym, and the reason why I made the second floor double-high: a prison gym's gotta have a basketball hoop, right?

The library. The free time activities in prisons are always reading and working out, aren't they? What do you mean it's not like that in real life?

The director's (is that what the boss is called?) office.

The kitchen. I seem to have missed a wall segment, whoops. Oh well.

I'm pretty happy with this one overall. It bugs me a bit that the lamps are hanging in mid-air (the strings don't go all the way to the ceiling), but when I put them on the actual ceiling, they wouldn't light up the room.

Okay, that concludes the prison tour, let's get to the Prologue, then!

The Prologue

After I was settled with the idea of doing an apocalypse with Sal, the next thing I needed, was a reason for the apocalypse to happen. And possibly for Sal to be there in the first place, other than "he has a dream". That's where the borrowed villains idea came along. Villains are always happy to wreck havoc in other people's games, right? I thought about some of the stories I follow, and got permission to use a very nice little crew consisting of Seth Jaypalan and Rodney Jalowitz (I first thought of asking for Kimmy from

mzyra, but actually Seth and Rodney fit the bill better - and of course if I took one, I'd have to take the other), Marielle Hutchins Legacy and Cypress Vetinari. Out of these, I figured Seth would very much fit the bill for bringing them to Strangetown: if bored and lonely, he could do lots of things, many of which can't be described as wise. So that's how Seth got that role, and a sort of an unofficial leader status as well. In this universe, he's the only one who knows all the others at least by reputation (he's an actor and follows gossip online).

I built the old warehouse for the opening scene. It just somehow seemed like an appropriate location for such happenings. It's a residential lot, and Ajay Loner lives there now. Sorry Ajay, you're not getting played, just a placeholder.

Only a few outtakes here, what I did was not particularly complex staging really. The different fall down animations of the game got a bit of a workout, but otherwise it was mostly discussion, after all.

What villains do when they wander off the radar while you're busy with something else.

Speaking of falling down animations... Be afraid, be very afraid.

I think Cy is doing the fail at bowling animation. I never got him to close his eyes when down (way creepy, dude!), so I let it be and shot the picture to use from a distance, hoping that staring eye wouldn't be too noticeable.

The villains really do live in that mansion, and I've even played them a little bit. The house is, as I said, by

orikes13, and it's awesome.

Marielle's OTH is music and dance, by the way.

I wouldn't think Marielle is much into cleaning, but here's proof that she did, anyway.

Cranky Cypress is cranky.

He too, likes music and dance, though.

The rooms thing really wrote itself. Seeing what kind of bedrooms there were, I could immediately tell how to divide them. Marielle would pick for herself the feminine, comfortable one and leave the others for they guys. Cypress would not settle for the smaller room (nor would he want a purple one), so he gets the big blue room. Seth has enough sense not to argue him on that, Rodney might object to sharing, but I didn't want anyone dead, so Seth was able to prevent arguments.

mzyra commented that Rodney should be happy that they didn't get a double bed, and that made me think I should have given them one. Oh well, plenty of time to horrify Rodney, right?

The actual exploding scene was mostly pretty simple, since I didn't show the actual explosion, other than slightly edited a palm tree picture. A couple of fun notes, though.

The actual reason why Cypress is strutting in this picture is really a technical one: when he was walking normally, even my lowest OMSP wouldn't cut it, the suitcase would be too high and he'd shove his hand through it. Not good. Getting a bit desperate, I tried the strutting walkstyle, and realized that not only did it do the trick, it also looked like something Cypress would do in this situation.

Okay, so I did go for the age old "suitcase + alarm clock = bomb" thing, I hope you can forgive me. I was going through my buy catalog to see what I could use as the bomb, and those two objects caught my eye. Cliché, but it felt appealing since I'd think you could pretty much tell what is intended in the above picture even if I didn't use a caption at all.

Okay, time for some miscellaneous outtakes, starting with the covershot.

Me: Seth, could you please stop flamey thoughtballooning the vampire you had a fight with downtown? I'm trying to take pictures here!

Seth: "Is this better?"

Me: ... no, not particularly.

So, yeah. About the gameplay stuff. I have to be thankful to Sal for being a co-operative little villain in here. I naturally made him knowledge, and gave him his original personality, because otherwise he wouldn't be Sal. He was very co-operative as he rolled Max all skills as his LTW, as that is doable in college. Seeing that this is an apocalypse and not a legacy, I could of course have had him stick his head into the Re-Nu-Yu orb until I got that, but luckily I didn't have to. As a further sign of co-operativeness, I found out later that he sponge-bathes! Also a good sign. He majored in math, as that has nice associated careers (college-graduated sims can take a major-related career, even if that's not the first one in the paper).

As for his skilling, I took a risk and had him start a garden. I wasn't sure whether he'd have time to get eggplants in time. When he did, I wasn't sure if they'd work if they weren't thriving. I just had to cross my fingers and hope, because without a gold badge, he had no way to make the plants thrive.

Thankfully, they did work. So the risk really paid off towards the end, as Sal had more time left for other things.

And as I talk about founding the challenge, I naturally have to talk about Bim. The most important thing to know about Bim is this: Bim is Pure Awesome.

She really was the streaker of Sal's dorm. One evening when she came over, I managed to have Sal talk to her before she ran away. I hadn't yet actively started on spouse hunting, though I was keeping my eyes open. She was my first serious candidate for spouse, seeing that she was an NPC so she'd have some skills, unlike the dormies. And, possibly this was the last chance for a while to marry an NPC. Plus, streaker, plus, cute.

So I had Sal check her out. Two natural bolts. And they seemed to get along nicely from the start. I liked her more and more all the time.

I mean, look at her, how can she not be awesome when she does stuff like this and pulls faces like that? I also love it that her name is Bim. It's cute, and sufficiently weird, and it goes together with "Sal" in some funny way. And I don't mind at all that she has basically Author's hair. Clearly, Sal has a type.

This, of course, is Bim's downside. Strategically, it would be smartest to marry someone with a high-ranking job in a useful career, but after I started thinking about these two together, I couldn't think of standing in the way of true love. Sal is, after all, very much a true love type of guy.

I let them have a bit of fun, since it was still possible during Sal's college years.

Sometimes, though, fun was interrupted by Seth, who had a problem with the local Grand Vampire.

Who oddly resembles Curty. Life in an alternate universe can be rather confusing. Especially seeing that he also resembles a certain Christian from

mzyra's universe.

Getting good kissing shots out of these two, by the way, is not easy. They are both somehow pointy in such a way that once their lips touch it tends to look really odd.

Something that amused me while playing: the inhabitants of Strangetown seem to love this topic.

And I mean really really love it. Most of the time I didn't even catch pictures, but they'd talk about it a lot.

Sal and Seth really are friends in my game. They met on one of Sal's community lot errands early on, and Seth started calling Sal regularly. A lot of my sims seem to have a "dedicated caller" - a sim who will call them frequently, even if their relationship is already 100/100 or thereabouts. It seems that Seth became Sal's dedicated caller. It somehow made sense to me, so I let them be friends in the story too. Sal has met the other villains, but doesn't know them too well.

More random community lot happenings. Simultaneous soap pranking!

A hapless townie being pickpocketed.

These two happened in a row. The burglar, who was just walking by (Sal was probably digging for treasure or something), was pretty pleased when two sims ran to him to compliment him. Dunno what was up with that.

Being a downtownie, Rodney has a duplicate in this hood, named Zeeshan. I haven't so far bothered to treat him with death by makeover, so sometimes it seems like I have two Rodneys on a lot. Makes for a confused Katri sometimes.

The real Rodney, by the way, does a lot of this. He's like Alphabetia's Malcolm Landgraab: both are fortune but get aspiration for pretty much each new sim they meet.

I also have lots of pictures like this on the cutting room floor. I didn't really bring it up in the story, but naturally, Sal was finding out what sims' jobs and skills were for as long as he was allowed to. I have a pretty nice list written down. My current problem is transferring as many of his contacts to Bim as I can, before he goes senile. And seeing that I can only call on Tuesdays... It's gonna be hard.

I don't usually like mr. Big and the Diva much, but these two were pretty cute on their own.

I've turned ACR off for this hood, although it seems like at least some of the townies have gender preferences off the bat somehow, so I don't know. Either way, these two got together all on their own, and are kinda stalkery, too.

Some townies like to help when poor, stinky Sal hits a water pipe. Aww. I think Rodney did this once, too.

Sal, behave!

Sal didn't exactly have the best luck fishing.

Unlike some others.

But hey, it's less messy than digging for treasure, and you can socialize at the same time. Although it's a lot less lucrative, at least without much skill.

A couple of more shots of happy!Sal. (Too bad we couldn't keep those photobooth photos.) In my head, despite the apocalypse, Sal is actually happy in Strangetown. He has Bim, and none of the weight of his past to worry about. Life is tough once the apocalypse starts, but at least he's alive and safe, and with Bim.

Did I mention that this is a frequent topic of conversation?

Okay, I think that was just about it for these two updates. The back to playing the Bookacy rotation and arranging the next chapter.