Celebrating 25 Years of The Sims: Shaine Korman

For the past 25 years, our team has poured its passion into deep, thoughtful, and authentic experiences that reflect life’s many possibilities (as well as a few fantastical possibilities we wish existed). But life, as it turns out, is pretty darn big, which is why we’re constantly introducing new content and features to expand The Sims universe into a story-telling platform that’s representative of its player community. 

As part of our ongoing birthday celebration, we’re talking to our team members about the most meaningful projects they’ve been a part of since joining The Sims family and exploring the ways in which their unique perspectives have informed the features and updates we’ve added over the past 25 years. Today, Technical Director / Senior Software Engineer Shaine Korman tells us how she transitions from pursuing the Video Game Developer career in The Sims 3 to actually working on The Sims itself.

What was your first role on The Sims, and how has it changed over time?

My current title is Senior Software Engineer, but I'm actually working with the technical director group right now. So I'm credited in the game as a technical director. It's a little confusing [laughs].

I started on The Sims 4 as a Pathfinder Intern my sophomore year of college. I was on the gameplay engineering team on The Sims 4; that was the Cats and Dogs Expansion Pack at the time. Then I came back for another internship before joining the team full-time, still in gameplay engineering. I was really fortunate that it worked out, and the team is really great. I was happy to discover that it's not just the product that's really fun. The team is also really inspiring and talented. 

I worked on a bunch of packs as a gameplay engineer, and then for the Lovestruck Expansion Pack, I was a gameplay engineering lead. Eventually I transitioned from Gameplay Engineering Lead to Tech Director work. My first internship was in 2017 and I joined full-time in 2019, so I think it's been about five and a half years full-time now. Actually, though, when I was really little, I beta-tested a different EA game. We got to pick a game as a reward, and I picked The Sims 2: Castaway as mine – of course it was a Sims game [laughs]. Even back then I was still working at EA, in a sense.

What’s the first thing you worked on?

The first feature I contributed to was making pets run away. It was like the saddest feature in the pack. But I think it set the tone for all of the packs I worked on. I’ve worked on some pretty wild features over the years. And even though that one was really sad, it was also really fun and meaningful to work on because it was kind of like a contained story arc, right? Like, your pet runs away, and then you have to post missing pet alerts on your phone, and then they come back, and it's like a heartfelt reunion. I had a lot of fun with it.

What’s the most meaningful thing you’ve worked on and why?

I actually have a couple answers to this. I think the feature that stands out the most to me, the one that I'm proudest of, was for the Cottage Living Expansion Pack. I worked on the pond tool, which is really cool. Before then, players had to use a preset pond shape, and with the pond tool, they could make whatever they wanted and fish in it. That was really challenging from an animation perspective because we had to make it look good and perform well regardless of what the player did. That feature was a really strong intersection of giving players a lot of creativity and also being able to support that with strong performance and animation. I think it came together really well in the end.

The other feature that I worked on that stands out is body hair because I think it added some needed representation to the game. We had it in The Sims 3, but we didn't have it in The Sims 4 at the time. I remember it was a big community ask. So it was really fun getting to work on that and getting to see Sims that look more like people I see every day. Seeing the player response was also really rewarding. That was one of the things from the trailer that everybody was picking up on, which felt really amazing as someone that worked on it. Being able to add content that makes players excited, it's just really special. It makes my work feel important and meaningful.

How does your personal experience help shape your work?

It's funny because it has always ended up that whatever pack I'm working on, there are connections to my real life. When I was working on the Cats & Dogs Expansion Pack, for example, I was spending a lot of time watching my parents’ dogs, and they would run away sometimes and I'd be like, “Oh, my gosh! It's… am I working? Or is this real life?” I also remember I worked on the Discover University Expansion Pack right as I graduated college, and it was like, “Oh boy, I'm back here again.” There have definitely been a lot of cases where I'm drawing on personal experience as I'm implementing different features.

Another thing I would add is, when I started working on the game, being a Sims player gave me a bit of a headstart because I already knew what content was in the game. That really helps from an engineering perspective, knowing which features are related to each other. As a player myself, a big goal of mine is to keep players engaged and give them a strong experience where they have those special moments that I had growing up where it's like, “My storyline’s coming together” or “Wow, this Sim is just like me” or “Oh, this house I built is really amazing.”

How important is it for Maxis to allow players to see themselves in The Sims?

I think it's very important. I think myself and a large portion of the player community is drawn to The Sims because it's a way to play with life, right? You get to experiment with things that you might not necessarily have opportunities to do in the real world. You get to see yourself following your dreams or picking up new hobbies. I've heard so many stories of people who became architects because they built houses in The Sims.

It's a sandbox where you get to live out different lives and different characters and different stories, and you can come at it from so many different angles. I'll recreate my office in The Sims, and that feels special and meaningful and something that you can't do in other games. Just being able to see those aspects of your life or your creativity on a screen, it's powerful and it's unique.

There were some steps taken on The Sims 3 to be more inclusive, but I think the fact that we’ve been able to do more on The Sims 4 gives players a lot more options. And in that way, I think that players can really express themselves and see themselves in the game in a way that we haven't been able to do as accurately until now.