Jefferson Demo Tutorial

 
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Contents

Playing the Tutorials
Home 1: Motive Tutorial
Home 2: Object Tutorial
Home 3: Economics Tutorial
Home 4: Architecture Tutorial
Home 5: Social Skills Tutorial
Home 6: Grand Play
Hints

Playing the Tutorials

Until we revamp the GUI and hide a lot of the developers-eyes-only stuff, you will probably need to read the How-To Guide to figure out how to get started and make it go. To make things a little easier, we include some Playing Hints for each scenario and for this general section.

The "spirit" of the tutorials is that you should try to play them out as described, to get a feel for the particular play element that each tutorial focuses on.

You May Cheat

In general, you aren't expected to add new people, or drag them around with the hand tool. (You're welcome to, of course. Nobody is keeping score yet.) It's also "cheating" to place food using the Object Tool. Feel free.

Controlling Your Family

You're going to want to learn to move your family members around the house. We frequently use a quick "left-click, right-click" sequence to move a character toward the edge of the display and then recenter on their destination point. Get used to cruising around this way (and let us know how you like it).

The Cast of Characters

Each tutorial has a different group of people. Most are your family members, and you control them as described in the How-To Guide. The visitors in Tutorial 5 are a bit harder to influence.

In the current version, the family members are portrayed by just four actors: Archie, Edith, Samantha, and Darren. Unfortunately, they are displayed in the Family Window by their real names, not their stage names. Coupled with the fact that Archie and Edith often play more than one role at a time, you can get pretty confused about which character you are controlling. One tip is to cycle through your family members as a matter of habit (tap the space bar).

Sorry.

Eating

Edith has wants and needs, motives and drives, and a bladder. What she doesn't seem to have is any free will. You have to manually instruct Edith to do everything. The hardest thing is to get her to eat. Here's how:

  • Take control of an Edith.
  • Click on the refrigerator and select Get.
  • After Edith opens the door and takes out the food, remember to close the door or the food will spoil.
  • Find some floor space, and click on the floor within six feet of Edith until she drops the food on the floor.
  • Click on the food, and select "Eat" from its pop-up menu. Edith only eats off the floor. After a couple of bites, the plate will be clean. Ignore it and it will disappear.
  • Food is provided by The Fridge o' Plenty, and some time after you remove food from it, you will hear a charge rung up as it automatically refills.

That's Edith. Archie and Darren are much more advanced. They take care of (most of) their own needs. When they're hungry, they'll just stuff their heads through the refrigerator door and eat right off the shelves. They still have to pay for it, but it doesn't appear to hurt their heads. Go figure.

Game Time

You'll need to learn to watch the game clock (in the "status bar" at the top of the main window). It's a good idea to change the game speed around when you get bored. We automatically switch it into "Ultra" speed when there's nothing interesting going on in the house. See time fly.

Selecting a Tutorial

The little houses in the "Neighborhood" are labelled. You might have to hunt around to find each tutorial home. Do them in order, please.

You can return to the neighborhood by selecting "Open" from the "File" menu. "Save" doesn't do anything (this must be the crippled demo version) unless you "crack" our protection scheme. Don't select "New" if you value your hard disk. Better to go back to the neighborhood ("Open") and choose a vacant lot if you want to start a house and family from scratch.

Home 1: Motive Tutorial

Edith lives alone in a small home which contains all of the necessities of life. See if you can keep her happy, or at least alive, for a few "sim days" (marked by her sleep cycle). You need to learn the basics of controlling a family (of one) and of object interactions, and also to read the motive graphs and/or thought balloons.

The challenge of this tutorial is to keep Edith alive for a few "days," and see if you can keep her net happiness in the green. It's important to keep her on a reasonable sleep schedule.

Hints.

Home 2: Object Tutorial

In this tutorial home, we find Archie, his brother Archie, and his other brother Archie. They have almost everything they need to be happy. You have to figure out which objects you need to buy for them so that they can survive indefinitely. You get to enjoy watching Archie sim with himself.

Archie operates perfectly well in auto-pilot: he'll attend to his every need, providing that suitable objects are available in his house to satisfy his motives. Some object interactions can satisfy him, but he isn't "drawn" to them [they don't happen to advertise the satisfactions that they can provide], so you may need to personally direct his behavior to entertain himself. Or you can purchase an object which he interacts with on his own to the same end (the Radio).

The point of this tutorial is to learn about household objects. Partly, you learn to place new objects into the house. But there is a deeper lesson about objects: they can fail if not maintained. Just try forgetting to flush the toilet for a while.

Hints.

Home 3: Economics Tutorial

The story... Archie and Darren are living an empty and shallow life of boredom because they have no TV. The only way for them to afford one is for Archie to go do an honest day's work.

Get Archie to his carpool on time (and in a good mood) and maybe, just maybe, their lives will be worth living.

Hints.

Home 4: Architecture Tutorial

Archie stands in the driveway to his new home. Unfortunately, he forgot to inspect it before he bought it. It's sort of a fixer-upper. Well, more than sort of.

You must now be "Mr. Handyman" before Archie freezes to death or starves. You also have to furnish the house, so you might take the opportunity to do a little expansion remodelling.

Once you get ol' Arch squared away, play around with the architecture and landscaping tools for a while. You might want to see if you can mock up your own house and lot.

Hints.

Home 5: Social Skills Tutorial

This is a good one. Living in this home are Edith and her sister Edith, the Bernoulli family. Outside the front door of the house is a "visitor generator" which periodically conjures up a visitor who knocks on the front door.

The goal of the scenario is to accumulate as many visitors as you can. The visitors, if unsatisfied, will leave the house and disappear back inside the visitor generator (if they can't get satisfaction in your house they won't stick around).

Hints.

Home 6: Grand Play

A big fancy hard-to-manage house which needs remodeling, receives visitors, is low on funds, and is missing key objects.

Hints.


Hints

General Hints

Some pointers (assuming you've read the How-To):

  • The game frequently needs to be placed in "people control mode" by clicking the little person icon in the lower-left corner of the tool bar. In particular, you need to do that when you start each tutorial, place an object, un-pause the game, and so on.
  • Make sure the Family Window is open. And figure out how to read it.
  • A couple of menus should be dismissed: If you hold down the left button on the "Person Control" icon, you get a funny little menu with two choices: "A->B" and "A->A." You want the first one, trust me. Also, when you click near any door, you might get a front-door answering menu. Try to ignore it.

Tutorial Home 1 Hints

  • You have to work quickly to keep Edith from fainting (and dying) from hunger, and from wetting her pants. First eat, then pee (flush and wash hands!), take a shower and put her to bed.
  • The spinning clock in the upper-left indicates Ultra Speed while Edith is asleep.
  • There are some itches which only The King can scratch.

Tutorial Home 2 Hints

  • It's hard to keep track of which Archie is active. Remember to look for the "flashing brightness" of the "active" Archie.
  • Add a TV or Radio to entertain the boys.
  • You might want to buy the Archies a second bed, if you get the chance.

Tutorial Home 3 Hints

  • The carpool (played by a honking blue box in the Driveway) appears around 8:00am (Game Standard Time) and waits for about 20 (game) minutes before it gives up and drives off without Archie.
  • Archie's happiness affects how much he earns at the job each day. See what other factors affect his salary, promotion, or termination.
  • The TV is only the most obvious way to entertain the fellows.
  • Just try buying that TV with your first $500, and see if you can get some moolah in the house before Darren dies of starvation. Once he's dead, it's a lot easier for Archie to make ends meet.

Tutorial Home 4 Hints

  • For best results (no tree crashes), Pause the game when working on architecture.
  • Notice there's no front door, so Archie can't get inside to eat, etc.
  • A few more rooms would be nice, but the ground needs to be levelized.
  • The hand tool moves trees (pending a chainsaw object)
  • Small little houses are not nearly as much fun as monstrously huge mansions

Tutorial Home 5 Hints

  • Remember you are dealing with the shiftless Edith. You have to remember to make her eat, go to the bathroom, go to bed, etc. The visitors have minds of their own.
  • You have to manually direct an Edith to open the front door when visitors arrive.
  • You can direct Edith to escort the visitors by clicking on the visitor and selecting "Follow Host." You "release" the visitors by clicking on their "Stop Following" interaction item.
  • When the visitors chase down Edith and appear to be praying, they are actually pleading with Edith to talk to them. You can't see it, but they have a very starved "Social" motive, which is why they came up to the front door in the first place.
  • You'll need to operate both Ediths in parallel to keep up. You have to feed the guests, talk to them, and escort them to the bathroom (oh, yeah, you have to read their minds to figure out what they're agitated about). You also have to keep the Ediths fed and alive (and Happy, or she'll will bum out the visitors). And keep answering that front door!
  • In one test run, both Ediths went to bed and the guests kind of ran amok in interesting ways. If you see that, try to remember how you got there and report back to us so we can reproduce it.
  • In a later version, Edith will be able to get two visitors chatting amongst themselves, so they stop following her around.
  • The visitor looks like the offspring of Darren and Archie from Tutorial Home 4.

Tutorial Home 6 Hints

  • We lied. There is no Tutorial 6 set up. Feel free to horse around in our test home, labelled "LOVELY HOME, Prefurnished." You'll need to manually spawn some people from the tool bar.
  • Advanced users: spawn a Samantha and see if you can get her to take a shower for you. Enjoy our clever transparency tricks.
  • Be very careful of the Big Brother object. Its low price may deceive you. It can be very benevolent, but it's a very dangerous object. Beware!
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