Creator Guidelines - Careers
Creating a custom career involves a lot of writing and a fair amount of creativity. As such it's a shame to let all that effort go to waste - so it's important that you ensure your upload meets the following criteria for approval; otherwise you'll just end up depriving downloaders of what may be a brilliantly written career due to mere technical details.
Creation Requirements
| EP Compatibility
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- Being graced now with a full 7 EPs, there's really no excuse for careers not being EP compatible. If you're not sure, there is a tutorial for making careers EP compatible here.
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| Overwriting
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- Custom careers must not overwrite Maxis ones. It's a simple rule, but may not always be obvious to beginning creators. Instructions on ensuring this are in the same tutorial as linked above.
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| Quality of Writing
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- Text is the main part of a career, as such it needs to be as close to perfect as possible. All text - job levels, job descriptions, and chance cards - must be triple checked for spelling and grammar; and must make general logical sense. Make sure you change the pronouns in male and female versions, and be careful in your use of $Me.
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| Job Pay
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- Unless your career is specifically meant to be unrealistic, make pay levels congruent with the pay of Maxian careers. A table of the basegame career wages is available here for comparison.
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| Custom Icons
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- Custom icons: Are required, unless you have a good reason for exception. They should meet the standards laid out in this mini-tutorial - that is; be the roughly right colour (if it's a single-colour silhouette), NOT be a random photo, have a transparent background.
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Posting Requirements
| Required Information
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- Information: Your upload post must tell us the following:
- How many chance cards are complete.
- All job titles.
- All job descriptions.
- All wages.
- All work days.
- The easiest way to present the last of these is something like this:
- Talking Example - §200 - M, W, Th, F, Sa
- Your job is simple. You sit in a wiki article, reading yourself to passers-by. This description would include brief mention of your promotion prospects; but really, from here, where can you go but up?
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| Required Images
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- You must attach your career's icon, even if it is for whatever reason not custom - the icon is usually the best choice for default thumbnail, too. You may also include ingame pictures such as the carpool, uniform, a particular chance card/job description/promotion bubble: however these are not required.
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Additional Stuff
- If your upload is rejected or marked as changes required and you're not sure why, ask in Creator Issues.
- If you're not sure whether your neighborhood is ready for uploading, use the Creator Feedback Forum to get feedback on it.
