The Sims Carnival

By: Derek Yu

On: June 20th, 2008

I know what you’re thinking… the Sims, Electronic Arts… is it the first of April again so soon? But no!

The Sims Carnival is a newish online community based on the Sims universe that allows users to make their own games and share them. At the heart of the community is the Game Creator (shown above), a simple Flash-based program that mimics the higher-level functionality of Game Maker and Multimedia Fusion. Users can use pre-made or original art and music assets, and define the “behaviors” of in-game objects using if-then statements provided by the software. Once you’ve made a game, you can upload it to the site after registering an account. Games made with Flash itself are also accepted.

I’m always excited by new tools that lower the barrier for people (especially non-developers) to make games and generally be creative. Even though the current games on The Sims Carnival are pretty primitive, I had a lot of fun browsing around – the enthusiasm of the community and its eagerness to improve is actually really inspiring! I especially enjoyed the games of Kid Akkade, like Akkade and MotorBike Mania, an Excitebike clone. Pick your own Adventure and IRON MAN VS THE HULK AND SUPERMAN also wrangled quite a few chuckles out of me.

The site was recommended to me by Rod Humble, who developed The Marriage and Stars Over Half-Moon Bay, and also works at EA. He also mentioned a competition they’re throwing where you can either win $1000 or a Nintendo DS (2nd and 3rd place). Both Game Creator and Flash entries are accepted.

(Thanks, Rod!)