Former XCOM and Civilization devs team up to launch a "next gen lifesim" inspired by Stephen King and Gilmore Girls

A group of former XCOM and Civilisation developers have co-founded a new studio, Midsummer Studios, who plan to “revitalise the life sim genre” with their debut release. The latter doesn’t have a title yet, and is described as “a next-gen Life Sim that emphasizes player-driven narratives, allowing communities to share memorable moments that grow out of the creativity of players themselves.” According to former XCOM and Marvel’s Midnight Suns director Jake Solomon, it’s “focused on the drama of modern life, where our players will write meaningful stories just by playing, and then share those stories with the world.”

Midsummer’s other founders are Grant Rodiek, who spent 18 years at Maxis as a producer and director on The Sims, and Will Miller, former lead designer of Civilisation: Beyond Earth and former lead engineer of Midnight Suns. Nelsie Birch, meanwhile, is new to games: she hails from the world of municipal government and public finance, which sounds like it’ll stand her in good stead as the fledgling studio’s chief operational officer.

Midsummer Studios have funding from Tirta Ventures, Betaworks Ventures, 1Up Ventures, F4 Fund, Krafton, Day Zero Productions and Transcend Fund. The latter’s founding partner Shanti Bergel used to be a producer on The Sims, and has “an abiding respect for how hard it is to deliver the alchemy of community, systems design, gameplay, and user generated content necessary” to create a good life sim.

So what is this life sim, exactly? Going by Solomon’s recent chat with Eurogamer’s Katharine Castle (RPS in peace), it’ll be a lot like The Sims, but with a greater emphasis on players composing stories they can share in some fashion. "We do play The Sims here because there are so many things that it does really well," Solomon told Katharine – good old Katharine, as I used to call her, before she levelled up and left us all alone with that awful Graham. “And when you've got a team of largely ex-Firaxis developers, some of whom have never worked on or played a life sim before, ‘I was like, 'Oh my god, you've gotta play The Sims'. There's no way you won't play [that] without laughing and being like, 'Oh, this is a very joyful game."

By the sounds of things, the game will take place in a small town, these being "very rich storytelling environments", in Solomon’s analysis. Inspirations include Stephen King novels, Gilmore Girls, Touched By An Angel and Midsomer Murders. So, a small town that plays host to both cross-generational bantz and scares of the supernatural variety? Solomon adds that "there's a reason why small towns work really well, because you can establish that everybody's got these almost incestuous relationships. So if you do something here, it's going to come back to you here."

You’ll start by creating a character and choosing a story theme, such as finding romance, which feeds into a brace of major and minor storylines. The developers want outcomes to be entirely open-ended, and the underlying town simulation is designed to spin on forever, throwing up new scenarios. There’s also a Creative mode for the more capricious life simmer and/or people whose first smalltown soap opera was Wandavision. This lets you instantly edit a character’s appearance, mood, relationships and personality.

Lest the above seem out of synch with Solomon's previous work, he's been thinking about life sims for some time. Katharine picked his brain on the subject last April, before she left us in the lurch with Nic and his appalling trombone obsessions. Here's the digested version of that conversation, in which Solomon reflects on the sins of Midnight Suns (whose life simmy aspects are among its least-liked features), and here's the full unedited Q&A for RPS supporters.