Meecha

A single dad and his daughter.

"Scrapin' By" Family Home
What it lacks in charm, it also lacks in comfort, but it'll get the job done until you get back on your feet.

Bedrooms: 2
Bathrooms: 1
House type: Single-wide trailer
Max. occupancy: 3
This is a simple mobile-home, using mostly core game content. The only exceptions to this rule are the veranda (sourced from On Holiday) and the interior doors, which I made myself. The idea of a trailer came from the very first playable Sims prototype, as well as my own tendency to build them in The Sims. I can't tell you how many trailers I've made, across all the games that have Build Modes. This one is the latest. Johnny can be seen sitting on the patio because he decided to sit there instead of the available dining chairs inside the house to read his cookbook. Who knows why.

Johnny
Single dad, Johnny, just moved here from SimCity. While he has high hopes for the future, he needs to find a good role-model for his daughter, Jenny. That means finding a girlfriend--preferably one who doesn't run away when he tells her he's a single parent.

Astrological sign: Libra
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Jenny
Jenny just moved here to live with her dad, Johnny. She likes puppies, soccer, the colour blue, and reading "Homeschule" online. She loves her dad, but wishes he would spend a little more time playing Monsters & Mythos with her. Oh well... adults are weird.

Astrological sign: Aquarius
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Tammy (not present in house)
Tammy thought she was ready to start a family, but once her daughter was born, she considered maybe she rushed into it. She thought she understood how her life would change, but it's like they say: you can't understand something until it happens. She left Jenny in the care of her ex-husband and made a beeline for Miniopolis in the hopes of re-inventing herself.

Astrological sign: Pisces
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After being laid off from Dalton-Slante Advertising in SimCity, Johnny moved to Sunshine Acres for a new job with the newspaper office there. Despite moving so far away, he assured his ex-wife, Tammy, that he would still be able to take care of their daughter, Jenny, of whom they shared joint custody. Shortly after moving into his new house (which the realtor had misrepresented as something other than a ratty old trailer from the early '70s), the newspaper office closed when the Sunshine Acres Investigator was acquired by Darcmarj Media Group. While he was trying to regroup from the sudden loss of his job and the very real possibility of foreclosure, Tammy arrived on Friday afternoon with Jenny, telling him she was going out of town for the weekend. Cheerfully greeting Jenny and asking her to go get a soda and play something on his Miyahon HEC emulator, he expressed his dismay at his ex's sudden appearance and demanded to know where she was going that she couldn't take Jenny with her. Tammy told him nothing, but blamed him for moving so far away from their house in East Jerome. Before rolling up her window and leaving, she told him that Jenny needs to finish her book report for school and to only call her cellphone in the case of an emergency. Watching her drive away, Johnny wondered where he went wrong, trying to figure out what he had done to make their relationship sour so badly. He still loved her as intensely as the day he asked her to marry him and was devastated when she asked for a divorce last year. However much he blamed himself for the divorce, he was determined not to let Jenny know anything was wrong.

With Sunday evening fast approaching and no word from Tammy, Johnny rang her cellphone. She did not answer, but she had changed her outgoing voicemail message to include: "If this is John, I'm too busy to come back and get Jenny. Figure it out for yourself." Having no choice anymore, he told Jenny that her mother wasn't going to be coming back to get her. Jenny cried in equal parts disbelief and anger, for the fact that her life was different now and that her mother didn't love her anymore. Johnny assured her that she was welcome in his house and that she could live with him forever.

The next day, he applied for the first job he could find online; a golf caddy and cart technician at Meier Hills Country Club. The hours were a bit strange, requiring Jenny to get herself to school most days, but it paid enough he could knock down the bills and still afford enough food for two people. He disenrolled Jenny from Quigley Elementary in East Jerome and enrolled her in PS-123. It was a large school, servicing not only Sunshine Acres, but also Interhogan, Landry Lakes, and Calvin's Creek.

While Johnny is pretty sure of his ability to provide for Jenny, he's concerned that she no longer has a strong female influence in her life. As such, he's started dating again. For the most part, his dates have all ended awkwardly after he mentions that he's a single parent. He's starting to wonder if there are any women anywhere who won't run away when he mentions Jenny and is considering neglecting to mention her until his date falls hopelessly in love with him.

Jenny, in the meantime, is an average student of PS-123. Her grades aren't great, but they're not bad either. She has the tendency to answer "47" to any math problem she doesn't understand and has occasionally turned in entire homework assignments with nothing but 47's. She has an aptitude for literature and consistently gets A's and B's in English class; she has been working on an adventure novel in her spare time which (she keeps changing the title of, but presently) is called Cavern of the Howling Wind. Her chief inspiration for it has been Monsters & Mythos a tabletop roleplaying game that a classmate of hers in 1st grade got her hooked on.

She is aware of her parents' troubled relationship, but does not understand why her life needed to change as a result of it. She feels as though Tammy abandoned her because she was failing in math class at Quigley and hadn't taken out the trash the first time she was asked. Johnny has noted Jenny's tendency to take out the trash when there are only a few objects in the bin, but hasn't thought to ask her why she's doing it, simply assuming that she's being proactive about their small house getting stinky from rotting food tailings. In fact, her math grade at Quigley had been C-, but she mislaid a worksheet that the teacher had been hyping as a large portion of their quarterly grade, and was convinced that this was adequate to tank her entire grade back to 0%. For this reason, she always completes worksheets at school or, if she isn't able to, brings them home in a dedicated "WorkSheets" folder (with that name written on it in CamelCase like that). By her system, there should be no more than 1 worksheet in that folder, and if there is more than one, she panics. Her homeroom teacher asked Johnny at conferences why she would be crying while turning in a history worksheet, which Johnny was not able to answer. Jenny is hesitant to explain this to her father in case it insults him and he throws her out of the house, too.

Johnny Meecha is based on Ross from The Sims Steering Committee prototype. I didn't much fancy the "amnesia" bit and decided to give him a proper backstory. His name is derived from "meet you", because in my original Sunshine Acres tech document, Johnny was the first sim you would play with. While I was building in the original neighbourhood (the bit that was there before Old Town got tacked on in Unleashed), I was trying to limit myself only to content that came with the core game of The Sims, or custom content that I'd made myself. That went out the window pretty quick when I started on the Fellows house, but Johnny, Jenny, and their trailer predate any of that. Johnny's outfit is actually a recolour of the similar white-stripe shirt from the core game that I made while writing a guide on recolouring skins in GIMP last year. I'll publish it at some point. The guide details every step of turning the black shirt and green trousers skin into this red shirt and blue slacks one. Also, the mesh is a variation on B004MaFit that I made in middle school with a tool called (I think) MeshEdit. I reduced the mesh's muscle tone quite a bit so it just looks like he's got broad shoulders but is not a bodybuilder.

Jenny was the result of my desire to add some kind of jeopardy to Johnny's life, preventing him becoming just another "Michael Bachelor" type. I've created WAY TOO MANY single sims in my time and they all ended up getting sidelined or even evicted and deleted because they were just too uncompelling to carry on with.

At the same time, I wasn't looking for a nuclear family unit like the Pleasants or Goths. I decided to make Johnny a divorcé with shared custody of Jenny with some other sim somewhere. At first, I wasn't too keen on defining who that other sim was, since you'd never see them (thus far, divorce with joint custody of children has yet to appear anywhere in The Sims). But as I was prepping screenshots for this page, I realised that I could define a mother for Jenny here, even though she doesn't technically exist in the game. Since I was keeping names on the simple side, I decided on "Tammy", partly because of Tammy Larsen from Bob's Burgers, partly because it follows the same naming convention as Johnny and Jenny—a 5 or 6 character, bisyllabic name with a double letter. When I was preparing Tammy's screenshot, however, I forgot that I had been trying to use only core game content or my own CC... so, Tammy is wearing an outfit from an expansion pack, but I don't really know which one. Her headband appears orange, but only because I decided to recolour it from pink in MS Paint to match her shirt. I kind of like it, actually; I might make that change for real the next time I start Creator.

Anyway, being my analogue for Ross from the Steering Committee prototype, Johnny's supposed to end up with either Alexa or Siri Besties, unless I decide to make them gay for each other at some point. Also, Tammy's biography indicates she moved to Miniopolis, the central location of The Urbz for Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS, to re-invent herself. And she did! You know her as Kris Thistle.