Ocean Quigley talks Zombies and Nuclear Disaster in Simcitizens Interview

While SimCitizens went to  San Francisco, we had the privilege of conducting an interview with Maxis Creative Director Ocean Quigley, who was happy to answer a few fan question sent in to our Twitter feed!

One of the questions I wanted to know about is the Limited Edition “Heroes and Villains” set. What comes along with that set, and what kind of modules can we expect out of it?

So, the major stuff that comes with the Heroes and Villains set is Maxis Man and Dr. Vu; these guys will actually change the simulation behavior of what the game does. If you order the Digital Deluxe set, there’s a bunch of European landmark stuff like the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, and the Brandenburg Gate. These landmarks affect the buildings around them, converting them into a European style. It also comes with a German high-speed rail, a French police station and police car set, and the double-decker bus! I may have missed a few things, but there’s Maxis Man, Dr. Vu, landmarks, more vehicles, and a bunch of different buildings.

When you place these landmarks, do they automatically generate the new buses, or do you have to place a specific bus station that comes with that set?

For that situation, you don’t even need to put the landmark down. You can just plop the bus station down and you’ll get the European double-decker buses. You can get the German high-speed train station, or the French police car set, whatever it might be, they’re independent of each other.

Another example, if you put down the Eiffel Tower in your city, well, then you’ll get Parisian-style buildings developing around it. However, you don’t need to put down the Eiffel Tower to get, say, the French police car or the British double decker buses.

What are some of the things that come with Dr. Vu’s set of modules? How can he affect other cities as well?

So the main thing Dr. Vu does is… Dr. Vu is a sort of technological genius. So you put down the Vu headquarters and he supercharges all the high-tech industrial buildings around them; so you’ll wind up with a city that kind of rushes forward into high-tech. But Dr. Vu comes with some down-sides; he’s got these cultists that come to Vu Tower and start committing crimes. They’ll run around robbing people or buildings so they can get money to buy Dr. Vu’s products. You’ll wind up with this criminal population that fills your city, that have been essentially corrupted by Dr. Vu, and of course those criminals, well, they can go anywhere they want to.

You know, they can go down the highway to the neighboring city and commit crimes. Dr. Vu also has a Vu-Tank robot that can occasionally break loose and commit mayhem in your city.

Alright. Speaking of some of the disasters that were in the Beta, there was a specific “zombie attack”, and some players wanted to know how to handle such a situation.

I’m really pleased with the zombie disaster because it’s the first disaster that we did that really takes advantage of the agent system. A lot of that agent-simulation was originally developed in academia to model, say… the spread of diseases. So in a sense, the zombie-plague is modeled like a flu epidemic.

You’d have a “patient zero” somewhere who goes out into a population and infects the people around him. Then those people become zombies, get killed, or there’s some chance that they don’t get infected. The process sort of repeats itself and you wind up with this sort of snowballing epidemic. Since nobody’s all that interested in flu viruses in the game, I decided to make zombies instead since it was much more visible. Although, it’s really an epidemiological situation that’s kind of dressed up like a zombie simulation.

The way to deal with it—like the equivalent of the CDC that deals with a  flu disaster—is the police force. So if you’ve got enough police in your city, they’ll chase the zombies down.  When the zombies break into people’s homes to try and kill them or convert them into zombies, the police will fight back! If you have enough police in your city, they can save the day.  But if you don’t, then the zombie horde will grow and grow until it overwhelms your police. Thankfully, zombies burn up in daylight, because we didn’t want to make it so your whole city would completely turn into a wasteland. If you can just make it through the night without losing everybody, then you can clean up in the morning.

Let’s talk about the nuclear power plant, and how it spreads radioactivity if there are unskilled workers. We were wondering how you manage a situation when there’s a radioactive area?

Firstly, if you have a nuclear power plant that you staffed with uneducated workers and it goes Kablooey, it’s gonna smear radiation all over the place and everyone will just run. It’s basically going to de-populate the residential areas in your whole city. Nobody wants to live in a Chernobyl zone! But, the radiation will slooowly decay on its own over the course of some game years.

You’ll still get some industrial activity so you can say “Well, I guess I’ll bulldoze all those abandoned houses and start zoning industrial,” because factories will still build in an radioactive wasteland. You can get people living in the other cities in the region to come by and work in your radioactive factories. That’s what I’d do if I had a radioactive city, I’d just make a radioactive factory, and then have poor people come in from outside of the region to work there.

And final question: What are some of your future plans for this series? And will this game have any kind of downloadable content or a store from which players can purchase extra buildings or anything of that nature?

So the glass-box simulation is a modular simulation; previous Simcity’s were more of a monolithic top-down simulation where everything was authored up front and it was really hard to edit or change or transform the simulation. However, the glass-box simulation is more like a bunch of lego blocks where anything can be added afterwards. It doesn’t just change the visuals, but actually change the full-on simulation behavior.

As to what we’re going to do next with it? Well, by way of analogy I can point out how we went from SimCity Classic to SimCity 4 over the course of 15 years of development or so. The game sort of got more and more rich and sophisticated and complex. With this new SimCity, we’re kind of back to where we were with SimCity Classic; you know we have the full arc of development still in front of us, all this stuff to discover. Exactly how we’re going to populate it and what kind of stuff we’re going to fill out with, well, that’s going to wait until after we’re done with getting the final shipping product out.  But, yeah, we’ll expand the game; there will be more stuff, and the game will get deeper and richer as time goes on.

Well that’s it for the interview, thanks everyone for submitting question on Twitter! We look forward to seeing you in the game!