Former XCOM lead and pillar of strategy games Jake Solomon announced this week that he's co-founded a new studio and will be working on a life sim game, of all things. As it turns out, he's actually been hoping to work on a relationship simulation for a very long time.

"Right off the bat, it's going to seem very different from what I've done before," Solomon said after the announcement. "But this is where my passion is: emergent player stories. I want to make a game that you can't play without writing a story."

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

"What we want is for players to tell the game 'hey, I'm trying to tell this kind of story," Solomon says, whether it's about romance or family or running a successful business. "And then we actually generate a cast of characters to make this story more interesting.

"We are pre-seeding the town with relationships. So when you start the game, just like you would start up a book or a TV show, your character has relationships in the town. If you're trying to tell a romantic story then we'll say okay here's your starting cast: your ex-lover is your coworker and 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 Fortress? I asked Solomon if the comparison fit.

"Nobody has said that, but that's a very good way to put it!" Solomon tells me, laughing. There are important differences of course. I don't get the impression that he's planning for players to read a giant wall of text that explains the tragedies, usurpers, and doom of society every time you start up a new town. "But yes, we want it to feel like a simulated environment," he says.

After choosing their story style and getting that starting town of neighbors created, Solomon says a player can go in and edit characters if they actually want those relationships to be different.

The concept of players always being able to concoct a story is one Solomon returned to often during our talk. He also described his ideal audience as Sims players on Tumblr sharing screenshots of their dramatic storylines.

For folks who have been playing The Sims for years, we can occasionally get that burnt out feeling where inspiration for a new project just isn't striking us. It sounds as though Solomon is envisioning a life sim where you never have to ask "what should I do next?" because the hooks of some dramatic tension are already waiting for you to pull on 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 there are no screenshots or trailers to speak of—but you can find a few more details about Solomon's small town drama life sim vision in our longer interview.

It's no secret that the developer of Stardew Valley, Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone, has poured his heart and soul into creating and refining the beautiful life-sim game. But like most things, this dedication can be a double-edged sword, as it has also stopped him from working on Haunted Chocolatier, his next game. 

"[Fan expectation] definitely puts pressure on me," Barone says in an interview with Aftermath, "but it's better to have a delayed game that's actually good than a bad game that's on time. When it's ready, that's when I'll release it. I'm not too concerned with the pressure. I don't feel like I owe anyone anything when it comes to Haunted Chocolatier. It's a game that I'm deciding to make. I don't need to make it."

Recently, Barone took time off from working on Haunted Chocolatier development to focus on  Stardew Valley's 1.6 update, which added a ton of new features and festivals.  "I was like, 'I can't just release a technical update because if I say there's a new Stardew Valley update, and there's literally no new content, I feel like people will be disappointed.' So, at first, it was just the Desert Festival, but I have this problem where once I start, I can't stop. I'm thinking, 'Oh, this isn't enough. It'd be really cool to add this. I would love to add this.'"

Even after the patch was released Barone said that he wanted to wait a bit longer until it was "bug-free and out to all platforms" before returning to work on Haunted Chocolatier. "Once I reopen the book on Stardew, I always have a hard time closing it again because I always want to add more things, make it better, make it cooler, make people happy," Barone says. "It's exciting. Every single thing I'm adding, I'm thinking about how people are going to play this, talk about it, and love it. It's gonna be part of their experience. It could make a memory that they might cherish forever."

Although there is undoubtedly a lot of pressure from fans who get excited by every tiny new detail about Haunted Chocolatier, most fans are just happy to see Barone carrying on with what he loves to do, confident that things are only going to get better. "You can tell from Stardew Valley how much he loves the game and its community, and I know he will be bringing that same energy to Haunted Chocolatier," one player says in a Reddit thread. Honestly, I'd be happy if Haunted Chocolatier turns out to be half the game that Stardew Valley is right now.