The Sims Carnival

By: Derek Yu

On: June 20th, 2008

I know what you’re thinking… the Sims, Electronic Arts… is it the first of April again so soon? But no!

The Sims Carnival is a newish online community based on the Sims universe that allows users to make their own games and share them. At the heart of the community is the Game Creator (shown above), a simple Flash-based program that mimics the higher-level functionality of Game Maker and Multimedia Fusion. Users can use pre-made or original art and music assets, and define the “behaviors” of in-game objects using if-then statements provided by the software. Once you’ve made a game, you can upload it to the site after registering an account. Games made with Flash itself are also accepted.

I’m always excited by new tools that lower the barrier for people (especially non-developers) to make games and generally be creative. Even though the current games on The Sims Carnival are pretty primitive, I had a lot of fun browsing around – the enthusiasm of the community and its eagerness to improve is actually really inspiring! I especially enjoyed the games of Kid Akkade, like Akkade and MotorBike Mania, an Excitebike clone. Pick your own Adventure and IRON MAN VS THE HULK AND SUPERMAN also wrangled quite a few chuckles out of me.

The site was recommended to me by Rod Humble, who developed The Marriage and Stars Over Half-Moon Bay, and also works at EA. He also mentioned a competition they’re throwing where you can either win $1000 or a Nintendo DS (2nd and 3rd place). Both Game Creator and Flash entries are accepted.

(Thanks, Rod!)

Posted in Community, Competitions, Developers | Tags: EA, Maxis, RodHumble

Trotim

What? What is this tomfoolery?
Rod Humble

Thanks sir! I hope the tools may be of use to starting indie devs and current devs may find a new community of players to dip into.

Thanks again!

Rod
Rod Humble

Oh and this URL should get you playing without a sign in required

http://www.simscarnival.com/
robolee

The program itself isn’t indie, which would question relevance, but I suppose the creations are indie… In a way.

Though the creations are just as indie as the creations from the spore creature editor… I expect there will be more people questioning the relevance.

Well it is about anyone being able to create, and that is good enough for me, the easier it is for anybody to be able to have access to tools like this the better.
youcrumbling

i’m actually not at all interested in learning how to use gamemaker, so maybe i can put all my pixelation to good use this way.
Adam Atomic

$1000 or a Nintendo DS?

I guess I would have to pick the $1000.
Derek

The DS is for 2nd or 3rd place. Clarified!
Ryan

This is pretty neat! I can’t see how y’all don’t think this is indie :]

Here’s a cute one, loco roco clone:
http://www.simscarnival.com/portal/games/3734/page
TwiTerror

Too cool!
Trotim

Hey, Gamemaker isn’t that bad. This program however is D;
Jean-Sebastien

Most of the game seems to be variation of the sample material. They might want to include a “community rating” and only show the ones that aren’t rip-off the sample or copyrighted sources…
youcrumbling

well, i tried it out, and it’s lame.
oh well. back to mock-ups.
http://www.g4g.it FireSword

Just a question.. the game u make can be used only on their website? It saves in .mgz, so they run only on simscarnival website or everywhere url?