Hello, Simmers! I hope everyone is doing all right in these crazy times. Just stay indoors and stay safe—and maybe play some video games?!

As you are all hopefully aware, our next Community Voted Stuff Pack* is centered around knitting! Sims will be able to kick back, turn on some tunes, and start stitching to their heart's content. Knit a plushie! Knit a hat! Knit a mailbox? If you’re into that, I guess, we don’t judge. Knitting provides all sorts of creative avenues for your Sims.

I am the lead designer on this pack, and today, I’d like to talk about some of the gameplay that will be included with this Stuff Pack and give some insight into what's going on in early development.

Create-A-Sim Improvements

One of the cool things we’re adding to this pack is the chance to knit your own clothing. Sims will have the ability to unlock exclusive knitted clothing in CAS, making it available for everyone in their household to wear.

I felt like this was a very important system for knitting, perhaps the most important! While it may sound like a no-brainer, keep in mind that most clothing in The Sims™ 4 is readily available for all Sims to wear.

So, our idea was to create a new UI that displays locked Create-A-Sim clothing items. This way you’ll be able to view things like knitted sweaters and socks (yes, socks!) before knitting them. This will also show you everything your Sim can aspire to create! Knitted clothing needs to be special, not just something every townie wears (I’m looking at you, Eyeball Ring).

To better illustrate what I mean, I provided some UX mock-ups below. What is a UX mock-up? I’m glad you asked! Early in the design phase—after the design is written, but before it is finalized—our user experience designer (whose job is to design UI, among other things) reviews the design and creates imagery illustrating how the feature will look in-game. We can then review this as a team and make changes until we’re happy. Then, when the engineers and the UI artists implement the feature, they know exactly what it should look like. Pretty cool, huh?