#madeyeasks

I joke a lot that I mostly fly by the seat of my pants -- and that’s really only half a joke. When I started MV, I had four characters in mind -- Taz, Adia, Gretta, and Sforz. They were the four main characters from a story I’d written 8 years before, and when I set out, I’d intended on just kind of playing TS4 and seeing what happened (with a loose framework for the story I wanted to tell in mind -- that is, Taz having a romance with both Gretta and Adia, and having a baby with Gretta).

About a month or so later, I’d given up on actually “playing the game” and started staging screenshots and telling the story. (Obviously Sforz didn’t make the cut to stay relevant; whoops!) Cadence and Nick’s romance in Gen 2 was as far as I’d planned “ahead” -- which is to say, I knew I wanted Cadence and Nick to have a romance, but not exactly sure how I’d wanted it to play out. Since about January 2017, I’ve been just kind of “planning” what I want to happen in fragments, jotting down ideas or snippets of dialogue, and going from there. So, to answer part of your question -- I plan things out and write them rather than letting my sims drive the story. I honestly don’t remember the last time I just opened my game to play it -- a lot of what you see on my blog is staged and posed screenshots. Even if I’m using in-game animations, I’ve learned which animations will give me the facial expressions/reactions I want to use in my screenshots.

As far as organizing the story and keeping track of the different plot lines -- THIS (Google Sheets) is how I organized my timeline towards the beginning. It’s sort of an interpretation of how JK Rowling organized her outline for Order of the Phoenix that worked for me -- that is, each character has their own personal column/timeline, so I could keep track of how everyone’s story lined up with everyone else’s.

Obviously in some time periods I got very detailed with what was happening (generally the points where lots of people were together at the same time and lots of things were happening at once), and other places were more vague -- ultimately this system got overwhelming for me (and Google Drive) as I continued adding characters, so I switched to a much more streamlined method to keep track of things.

(I’m always on the lookout for other ways to keep track of various characters, their plot lines, and the passage of time -- currently Plotist seems to be a fairly decent way of keeping track of things? There’s a bit of a learning curve, but it’s free and definitely worth a look -- I’m still learning it myself, but I’m definitely willing to share what I’ve learned if you’re interested!)

My new system (Google Sheets) relies a lot on me knowing or remembering when certain events that aren’t births or deaths happen -- and a little bit of retroactive guess-timation. I have a few notes off to the side about particular (recent) events, but generally I retroactively fill in the dates of things in my head, and I won’t lie -- the ambiguous TS4 seasons helps a lot with this. (I’m more than happy to talk about this some more -- just send another ask!!)

Most of my plots tend to be more “sequential” than “simultaneous” (that is, Character A’s plot happens before Character B’s plot, rather than Character A and Character B’s plots happening at the same time), so I tend to keep up with “milestones” to keep track of time -- specifically births, weddings, deaths, and maybe a few others, depending on context. But if you want to talk strategy about planning out some simultaneous plots, hit me up and we can chit-chat!!

I feel like I don’t have anything else to add other than that without getting horribly off-topic and rambling!! But basically -- I wouldn’t say I plot everything out “in advance,” but everything you see is “scripted.” Anything posted on my blog is typically “planned” approximately 48-72 hours in advance on my morning/afternoon commute to/from work -- enough time for me to get in-game, take screenshots, batch edit them, and queue them.

Every now and then inspiration will strike and I’ll get enough screenshots/plot to write out enough posts to queue for more than a few days at a time (especially since my queue only posts 3/day) -- but that hasn’t happened in a while!!

Anyway, I hope this answered your question and helped at least a little!!