So, what’s been happening throughout this month:

Good morning, everyone! I hope you’re all doing well. Today I’m here to share what’s been going on behind the scenes over the course of this month. To be honest, November feels like it’s been the biggest month of the year so far, and honestly, that’s a good thing!

When I received my first opportunity to contribute to inZOI, I did my best to offer a solution for every issue or criticism I raised about the game. The problems they were facing at that time were very similar to the ones I had solved with my mods for The Sims 3. So I wrote a document with approximately 40 pages and sent it to the team. They were always receptive and kind. Once, a team member told me: “The team was so impressed that some even suggested hiring you!” That made my day.

Of course, I wasn’t hired. However, that single sentence completely changed how I viewed myself, and that alone changed my life more than any opportunity could. Since then, my contributions to the team, and my feedback, have only increased. I’m proud to look at inZOI and see how many suggestions were implemented, and knowing that I was part of that, representing our community, makes me very happy and grateful.

Recently, Kjun announced resizable windows. And although the system is very similar to what we’ve seen in Paralives, this was something I suggested some time ago. And, oddly enough, it was when I realized it probably wouldn’t be implemented that I decided to start my own game. Back then, the idea was a hybrid system of glass wall/window. We already had glass walls in the game, and I asked if it would be possible to pull or push them to give them some type of frame or shape. Well, if they implemented that idea (I thought), imagine all the others I suggested and assumed wouldn’t make it? I thought that because designing walls/windows the way I suggested would require redefining the current window design. But the team used an approach I hadn’t considered: instead of applying the system to every window, they gave us a single resizable window.

From a design standpoint, although it’s a great solution, I found it a bit inconsistent. I say this with the best intentions because I think: if the player can resize that window, they’ll assume they can resize all of them, but they can’t. Why would they stop using the other windows and use only that one? That might lead the resizable window, just like the modular object system, to eventually be less used or updated than it should be.

But the truth is that this announcement acted as a sort of “healthy competition” in my mind. I told my team: "We need to speed up development, we need to bring in more new stuff!" xD

So now I wanted to share with you what this month has been like for me. Because it’s been a (good) kind of madness!

At the beginning of the month, I was lucky enough to find a talk with Ocean Quigley that made me realize a truth I hadn’t noticed: every great game designer we know and admire, whether Ocean Quigley, Will Wright, or Kjun, is a lot more like us than we imagine. In fact, they are (and yes, this will sound extremely obvious and silly) just as human as we are. Meaning, they have their own insecurities, doubts, and often collect more failures than successes. I always looked at these guys as if they were on some kind of pedestal. As geniuses. And that conversation with Ocean leveled the playing field for me. The shock was so big that I thought: If they can do it, so can we. The only difference between them and us is the position they were in when they built the games we love. But that position doesn’t stop us from getting there too. Actually, maybe it’s easier for us than it was for them, considering everything they went through. We just need to be willing to fail fast and efficiently!

So I decided that in November, I would put my foot on the gas. I took the biggest modeling course I had, with more than 200 lessons, and completed it. It helped me understand how to build a more efficient workflow in Blender to apply modularity to our game.

It was extremely important and brought great visual results. I don’t think it’s the best work of my life, but it was definitely a great outcome!

Then I completed a Geometry Nodes course, which will help us eventually apply the idea of “procedural nature” to our game (if all goes well). In other words, what would happen if you neglected property or garden care and let nature slowly reclaim houses and lots? The idea is to allow vines to gradually grow around the city. It requires much more than just this knowledge to apply it, but it was something we considered while drafting our game’s GDD.

I set a goal to finish all my modeling courses by December 5th, so I could then start studying animation in Maya. So I moved on to my third course and learned how to model some new and very interesting items! It took me six hours to make that motorcycle yesterday xD But I’m happy with the result. (Note that this is the result of the modeling before texturing.)

In that course, I learned more about Blender modifiers that really accelerated my ability to model new items; it’s been great! I also learned to create some materials. Even though this knowledge may not be used, since we plan to create materials in Adobe Substance Painter, which means I’ll need new courses for that. By the way, yesterday we were working on a small prototype, and seeing my textures gain depth in Substance was incredible! I was very proud (the programmer was showing me how they look in the software).

(Random pics of the Stylized Scene course i'm did)

So, putting it all together: 3 modeling courses and over 400 lessons completed in a single month. Insane. To achieve that, I set a minimum number of lessons to finish every day and refused to do anything else before hitting that target, whether I was inspired or not. The funniest part is that I was talking to my mom saying: “I wish I could open my head with my hands and shove all the necessary knowledge inside by force, you know? It would be useful.” Looking back, although I didn’t literally do that, building this routine basically served that exact purpose.

• My current plans for December are:
  - Start and Finish my new animation course in Maya
  - Start learning Unity (we moved from Godot to Unity hoping to find collaborators and programmers more easily)

And this month, I bought around six new courses completely focused on programming and AI development for NPCs and characters. As I recently mentioned on a livestream, I’m a bit frustrated as a player that in 2025/26 we’ll have three life simulation games, but none of them deliver even a third of what The Sims 2 offered in terms of simulation. They’re all amazing in creation/customization of houses and characters, but substantially cold when it comes to actual simulation.

To me, if we fail in this area, then we don’t have a game. The life simulation genre should be about Life, not just appearance and objects. So I made the decision to incorporate programming into my study routine so I can better support my team. For a long time, I was the idea guy, but now I want to be useful. I want to be the action guy, the implementation guy, the change guy. That’s why I’ve been giving my best not just to study and learn more, but to reach the level of every member on the team in their area, so that if they face any difficulty, I, as the leader, can help them solve it.

Beyond all that, I also finished reading "A Theory of Fun for Game Design." Great book, by the way! And I’ve already selected another one to start soon: "Game Programming Patterns."

Before I forget, I learned how to build a workflow that lets me create, all at once, trims/moldings that fit into eight different wall angles! Ok, this might sound silly, but you have no idea how much I’ve been frying my neurons to simplify our workflow as much as possible.

In my mind, the more time I spend finding solutions now, the more time we save later.
Do you know the story about the axe?

I won’t summarize it for you, because if you made it this far, you probably like reading:

Once, an old lumberjack, known for always winning the tournaments he competed in, was challenged by a young and strong lumberjack to a contest. The competition drew the attention of all the local residents. Many believed that the old man would finally lose his title as champion of the lumberjacks, given the great physical advantage of the young challenger.

On the scheduled day, the two competitors began the contest, in which the young man threw himself into the task with great energy, convinced that he would become the new champion. From time to time, he looked over at the old man and sometimes noticed that he was sitting down. He assumed his opponent was simply too old for the competition and kept chopping wood with full force.

At the end of the allotted time for the contest, the productivity of both lumberjacks was measured and, to everyone's astonishment, the old man had won again by a wide margin over the young and strong challenger.

Intrigued, the young man questioned the old one:

“I don’t understand. Many times when I looked at you during the competition, I noticed you were sitting and resting, and yet you managed to cut far more wood than I did. How is that possible?”

“You’re mistaken,” said the old man. “When you saw me sitting, I was actually sharpening my axe. And I noticed that you used a lot of strength but achieved very little in return.”

This parable teaches us an important lesson that we can apply to our lives: it’s not enough to believe that hard work alone will be enough to succeed. There’s no point in running in any direction thinking that one day you’ll end up in the right place. It might happen, but by pure chance. You need much more than that. Just like the young lumberjack who believed his youth and strength were enough to win, many people believe they can’t stop for even a minute or they’ll lose time and money, when in truth they’re losing even more time and money. Only effort and hard work are not enough for a good quality of life.

However, the old lumberjack knew it was necessary to sharpen his axe periodically to do his job successfully. A set of other skills is necessary to achieve much better results. Obviously, it’s not enough to “sharpen the axe,” but to find the right balance between sharpening it and using it to cut the tree, always studying and understanding the best techniques and phases of life.

“If you want to cut down a tree in half the time, spend twice as much time sharpening your axe.”

And although my goal isn’t to cut down any trees, I’ve been sharpening my skills so I can produce more in less time, so that later, when it matters most in a few months, we can significantly accelerate the development of our game. It’s not enough for me that we’re good at what we do; we need, somehow, to be able to do it with mastery if we want to get anywhere. And by mastery, I mean practicing long enough to make it natural and simple. And we’re getting there, one way or another.

Our main advantage is looking at game design through the eyes of someone who wasn’t conditioned to do just that. We think about feasible solutions for players more than never-seen-before features for marketing. We look at simulation from a much broader and less rigid programming perspective, but at the same time, much simpler and less complex. If we manage to build a game that runs on the same requirements as The Sims 4 (2014) but with much more depth like The Sims 2, then at the end of the day, we can celebrate that we made something so simple and efficient that it would leave any programmer stunned. And honestly, I don’t see how we wouldn’t get there. I only see it happening. And sometimes, not knowing the technical restrictions, but being aware of the design failures we’ve seen in the last few years, may be exactly what we need to know where not to go and how to ensure our game becomes what demanding simulation lovers are looking for.

I hope I’ve managed to give you a small glimpse of everything happening on my side this month :D Yesterday I received my drawing tablet, and I hope I can learn how to use it to give our character models (which I forgot to share, but are already defined) even more detail and depth. Nothing too complex. I truly hope we can show you more over the next few months. Right now, we’re prototyping a lot of things, and although prototyping is part of development, it also means that much of what we build now will be discarded, but the knowledge and skills will be reused. Thank you for your time and support <3

Below are some random images I sent to our team while prototyping things in Blender, just to annoy or inspire them.