How a Real-life Architect Plays The Sims
Meet Leo, a content creator who builds virtual houses like he does in real life.
Since 2000, The Sims and its robust building tools have made talented creators out of its most dedicated players. It’s even reached a point where player-made builds have officially made it into the game: last November’s Snowy Escape expansion pack came with pre-built lots designed by four of the community’s top creators.
On YouTube, insanely skilled The Sims builders abound. One of them is Leo, a.k.a. XFreezerBunnyX, a Filipino content creator who hails from Roxas City. His channel has been around for seven years, where he started out uploading Let’s Plays of The Sims 3. Like most of us looking for ideas for our next build, he turned to other creators for inspiration when he first began his channel.
“I have been watching ‘SimTubers’ like TheQuxxn and TheSimSupply for years at this point and seeing them have fun doing what they do inspired me to create my own channel—and I have been here ever since,” he writes.
Cut to the present and you’ll see Leo’s channel regularly updated with new builds, each designed with a level of detail that most Simmers aspire to make. Some of my favorites are his Japanese-themed lots, which capture so much of the nuances of that culture’s architecture, from room configurations to exterior elements that fit naturally in a Tokyo street setting. Because Leo is a practicing architect in real life, this eye for realism shouldn’t come as a surprise.
“The Sims influenced one of my biggest life decisions, which was choosing to pursue a degree in architecture,” he recounts. “Having played The Sims gave me some basic ideas about architectural design that I was able to carry with me through college.”
Leo’s career as both content creator and real-life builder have achieved a kind of symbiosis, where his skills in one feed into the other. His familiarity with design trends allows him to fully optimize each lot he makes in The Sims, with equal attention given to function and form. He personally enjoys making builds in the contemporary Japanese style for its focus on minimalism.
“My favorite thing about this style is how efficiently everything is designed. It may look basic but, as a planner myself, I know there’s a lot of work done to come up with optimized plans. At the same time, it’s aesthetically pleasing.”
Still, making anything in The Sims is, of course, mechanically different from building a house in real life. Take it from me: it’s not enough to just grab a random blueprint of a house on Pinterest and expect a 1:1 recreation in the game. The physics and the math are just built differently. Of course, there are a bunch of tricks you can do in the game to work around its limitations, and Leo is no stranger to these.
“A lot of people forget that ‘moveobjects’ wasn’t a thing when The Sims 4 launched, and up until now it is my most used cheat,” he says, referencing a cheat that let you place objects anywhere on the lot, even over other objects. “However, if I had to choose one piece of custom content or mod, I would have to choose T.O.O.L.1 by TwistedMexi. It is such a powerful and versatile tool that unlocks so many options for builders.”
Leo continues to expand the kind of content he makes for his community. At the moment, he’s hard at work learning to make his own custom content, utilizing some of the 3D modeling techniques he picked up in college. He’s also working on his ‘save file’, which is typically an entire pre-built neighborhood designed by a content creator that other players can load into their game.
Although Leo works on his builds by himself, he’s made a lot of friends and connections within the community. His career as a content creator has also been boosted by being a part of EA Game Changers, a program that gives him and a few others early access to new packs. For Leo though, the real perk is finally coming full circle and meeting creators he used to merely watch years ago.
“The best part of being in the program is being able to interact with fellow Game Changers and the game developers themselves!”
You can subscribe to Leo’s YouTube channel here.