Former XCOM lead and Strategy Game Pillar Jake Solomon announced this week that he is co-founding a new studio and working on the All Things Life Sim game, as it turned out, he actually wanted to work on relationship simulation for a very long time.

"Soon, it will seem very different from what I've done before," Solomon said after the announcement. "But this is where my passion is: the story of an emergent player. I want to make a game that I can not play without writing a story."

In an interview with PC Gamer last week, Solomon described a system-driven life sim that, to my ears, sounded like everyone's favorite dwarf society survival game, at least in how he imagines the beginning of each story.

"What we want is for players to tell the game "Hey, I'm trying to talk this kind of story," Solomon says, whether it's romance or family Hi, running a successful business or not. "And we actually produce a cast of characters to make this story more interesting.

"We are pre-sowing towns with relationships. So, when you start a game, just as you start a book or a TV show, your character has a relationship in town. If you're going to tell a romantic story, we're your starting cast here and I'll say okay: Your ex-lover is your colleague, your neighbor is your high school boyfriend, and your secret crush is this rival in town."

So it's like starting a game of Dwarf fortresses," I asked Solomon if the comparison fit.

"Nobody says that, but it's a very good way to put it!"Solomon says to me with a laugh. Of course there are significant differences. I think the impression that every time you start a new town, the player plans to read a wall of huge text explaining tragedy, usurpation and the fate of society is "But yes, we want it to feel like a simulated environment," he says.

After selecting their narrative style and creating their starting town of neighbors, Solomon says players can go in and edit characters if they actually want their relationships to be different.

The notion that a player can always craft a story is something Solomon has often returned to during our story. He also described his ideal audience as Tumblr Sims players who share screenshots of their dramatic stories.

For people who have been playing the Sims for years, it sounds like we're occasionally imagining a life sim where the inspiration for a new project isn't just hitting us Solomon doesn't have to ask "What to do next"."Some dramatic tension hooks are because they are already waiting for you to pull as soon as you start a new game.

That's most of what we know about the first project from Midsummer Studios — it doesn't have a name yet, and a screenshot to talk to