Paltopia

In Paltopia you play as a new Citizen to an abandoned town with only a couple people left.

You are there to help the town out, before it is completely abandoned, will you be able to save it?

The current game is still in an early prototype, this game will be worked on in the future

Release Date: June 19th 2025
Versions: - v0.0.1 (latest)

v0.1 is available on Gamejolt, v0.2 is only available in the Goldie Launcher as an exclusive non-released build.

Inspiration

Paltopia was originaly made for my 4th School Project of my 1st year of college, and is a dream project of mine.

The game is very much inspired by MySims, my favorite Childhood game I used to play on the Wii.

MySims is a game about a town that was once a very popular town, with an old builder that made the town lively.

However, one day the old builder leaves the town, and people slowly leave, as no one is there to build new houses and new things.

Only a couple people remain in the town. But that is where you come in, you have the skill to build stuff, and the power to bring this town back to life.

Paltopia

Okay, but why make a new game about MySims called Paltopia. My dream has always been to have more MySims like games, and no, I am not talking about Animal Crossing, although they are similair, the MySims series has loads of characters that keep on returning, with intertwining storylines and universes that are all unique.

Paltopia wants to bring that feeling back, of having a world where you can create and explore, like as if you were a child, but reborn with new games and new graphics.

My goal is to make this a full on series in the future once I have more time to work on this project, and since MySims has been canceled for over 10 years now, it's a great way to bring it back!

(At least, that is my dream, for new generations to experience similair unique games)

Research

MySims

One of my main goals for this project was to learn how to do a lot of research, as I had never really done that at large scale before.

So with help from 2 of my Designer friends, I started with my research, and the best place to start was to play MySims again to see what gave me that classic feeling I had in the past.

It had been quite some years since I had played MySims, and one of the first things I actually noticed while playing was how the game tracked the progress of the Town, which was done by using a bar and stars (Seen on the left).

To get progress in the town, you have to get more people in the town, and complete their tasks, which consisted mostly of building furniture in the Furniture Creator

But certain characters request to have a certain style of furniture, those characters often have charateristics like:
- Cute
- Eduqational
- Sci-fi
- Scary
- Fun
- Food

But how do you put that on Furniture? That is where Essences come into play, and Essence is something seen within a lot of MySims Games.

Essence is just a material the player can find in the world, that is categorized in those "Interest" categories from earlier.

By using that essence as paint on furniture, you can fulfil certain tasks.

By completing tasks you'll gain more stars, more stars mean more people try and come to your town.

And you can get them to move in when you build them a house they like.

Also, with more stars come more areas to build houses for your Sims, that were previously blocked by Rocks and Logs.

I also researched other Cozy Games to see what they do differently, and what I liked and disliked about it (The Design) to make my own Design for a game.

(I will keep these slightly shorter in explenation to talk more abour Paltopia)

MySims Kingdom

For my 2nd game I decided to research another game in the MySims series, MySims Kingdom
(my personal favorite).

In MySims Kingdom it is focused a lot more on Story and an Open World aspect, compared to the smaller town you had before which is really fun to explore.

It also has a completely new building system based on Mana, instead of Essence, although Essence still exists for scrolls, which unlock new buildables.

MySims Agents

I also researched MySims Agents, but not much creativity is within that game, and it focusses a lot more on story driven elements which people loved as well.

The Downfall of MySims

Lastly 1 important thing I want to discuss is the downfall of the MySims series, in other words, why did a cozy game series fail so badly that it was canceled.

And for that I want to take a look at the reviews. MySims, MySims Kingdom and MySims Agents are the 3 most popular Games. But MySims Party, Racing and SkyHeroes were kinda bad, they took away the creativity and story / open world aspect, and instead made games that are knockoffs of other games, but worse.

After MySims SkyHeroes, the plug was pulled out of the game series, and it was left to be forgotten.

Other Games

The other games I researched were:
- The Sims 4
- Disney Dreamlight Valley
- Animal Crossings New Horizon
- Garden Paws
- Rune Factory 5

With all the Research combined, I came to the MoSCoW list for my game that is as follows

And this is the Essentials for what I based the Alpha of Paltopia from. This might change in the future, but for now, this is perfect for what I wanted the player to feel and experience.

Concepting

For the concepting I mostly made a mood board and a sketch for the island.

Moodboard.pptx

A lot f the moodboard concepts come from Games an Art that is very bright, playfull and cozy. It is also all quite simplistic styles that fit with the Cozy style as it doesn't hurt on the eyes too much, but instead gives a calming feeling.

With the Original MySims in mind, I did want to be kind of different than just being in the foresty area, instead I made it on the outskirts of an Island seperated from the rest of the world. Although this map is quite small, it was made for the Alpha, and not the full game in mind, as I had to decrease the scope.

Then onto how I made the Island. My main goal was to make everything by hand, not using any assets online (besides some textures).

3D Modeling

So first I made the Island in Blender, with some materials already set, and some questionable topology, I made this Island which could easily be added to UE5.

Just the island is quite empty. So as seen on the map, the island could use some Trees, which I also made in Blender from scratch

With the trees done, and some texturing added, we already have a great looking island in UE5.
With some more help of Texture Displaying on the Model of the Island I was able to create some good looking paths, although for a full game I would swap that out with actual meshes or splines.

When the Island was done, I had to make some characters, as just an empty island would be kinda pointless.

So I sort of made a mix between a Lego Character and a MySims Character as a base to create characters from

This is the temporary Character model for each character in the game, but this will change in future versions, as I want to make the model slightly more unique and better with the rig, so it has more control.

The Character turned to this with some temporary drawing and material use within the Game.

(Based on my friend Victor)

Development

Player

The player was coded similair to MySims Controls, where the camera points slightly downwards to not show the entire map at once.

Below here is a more close up version of the code with Player Movement, Camera Dragging, Highlighting

Dialogue

The Next thing to add, was Dialogue, cause without Dialogue, the characters feel kinda brainless. So with the interaction system I already had in place, I managed to create a simple Dialogue System.

With some help from Actor Components, I can easily add new Dialogues to the characters, altho this is not the exact system I would preffer for the later versions, as I'd much rather work with K2Node's to create my own custom Graph, but that still costs some research.

Below is the code of each component, it isn't the cleanest piece of work, but it was extremely re-usable and reliable.

Build System

The Build System is inspired a lot on MySims Kingdom, and this build system is the best one I have made to the date of release.

Every Buildable Actor Class has a Buildable Component which was all the code in it to make it a buildable (Just like the v1.4 shop system of Killer in Purple 2).

This system however could use some improvements like the buildables being Data Assets or Data Tables where I can easily add new ones.

Overal this game is quite simple, but I love the way it feels, and hopefully in the future I'll be able to implement systems that make it feel more natural, as the general feel of the systems can eb a bit clunky.

But room for improvement is a challenge, and taking on challenges is what I do.

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