Former XCOM and Civilization devs team up to launch a "next gen lifesim" inspired by Stephen King and Gilmore Girls

rockpapershotgun.com:

A group of former XCOM and Civilisation developers have co-founded a new studio, Midsummer Studios, who plan to “revitalise the life sim genre” with their debut release. The latter doesn’t have a title yet, and is described as “a next-gen Life Sim that emphasizes player-driven narratives, allowing communities to share memorable moments that grow out of the creativity of players themselves.” According to former XCOM and Marvel’s Midnight Suns director Jake Solomon, it’s “focused on the drama of modern life, where our players will write meaningful stories just by playing, and then share those stories with the world.”

Midsummer’s other founders are Grant Rodiek, who spent 18 years at Maxis as a producer and director on The Sims, and Will Miller, former lead designer of Civilisation: Beyond Earth and former lead engineer of Midnight Suns. Nelsie Birch, meanwhile, is new to games: she hails from the world of municipal government and public finance, which sounds like it’ll stand her in good stead as the fledgling studio’s chief operational officer.

Midsummer Studios have funding from Tirta Ventures, Betaworks Ventures, 1Up Ventures, F4 Fund, Krafton, Day Zero Productions and Transcend Fund. The latter’s founding partner Shanti Bergel used to be a producer on The Sims, and has “an abiding respect for how hard it is to deliver the alchemy of community, systems design, gameplay, and user generated content necessary” to create a good life sim.

So what is this life sim, exactly? Going by Solomon’s recent chat with Eurogamer’s Katharine Castle (RPS in peace), it’ll be a lot like The Sims, but with a greater emphasis on players composing stories they can share in some fashion. "We do play The Sims here because there are so many things that it does really well," Solomon told Katharine – good old Katharine, as I used to call her, before she levelled up and left us all alone with that awful Graham. “And when you've got a team of largely ex-Firaxis developers, some of whom