Ciem: Inferno/Set design

The desire to set things in Boonville goes way back to Comprehensive Gerosha in 2010, as it was viewed to be the best analog possible for where Gerosha as a city would be geographically located, in consistency with what was drafted in Gerosha Prime's The Battle for Gerosha. However, transferring the concept from an abstract to a practical proved difficult.

From 2010-onward, The Sims 3 was the default engine used for rendering anything. Google Maps was just beginning to undergo dramatic improvements to its format, but was not as useful for researching geography at the time interest first budded in reinventing Candi's origin story away from the cookie-cutter narrative established in 2006.

Erin's house
Erin's house was the first to get designed, modeled after 1205 N. 1st. St. as it appeared on Google Street View. However, the only image available in the fall of 2010 was the 2007-era render of the exterior. Several details were unclear in that older, low-res format. As a result, not all details of the house exterior were entirely easy to deduce.

A house was made inside Sims 3 in the Sunset Valley neighborhood, set to share an exterior with the house seen on Google. However, access to the interior was lacking - and that came at the expense of a completely inaccurate render for how the Flippo girls lived their lives. This issue was partially corrected in 2018, when use of an updated Google Street View with higher-res imagery and several photos of the interior taken from Realtor.com led to a redesign to a far-more-accurate version. Several screenshots of the Sims 4 interior of said house redesign were compiled to make a tour video.

Around 5:30 PM EST on March 9th of 2019, the Sims 4 render of Erin's house was made available for download on DzMD and Mod The Sims. A Sims 3 version was attempted, but the game crashed during construction. The Sims 3 version would've made some modifications to the design of Erin's home, including making the basement a walk-out basement to match reality and possibly moving the basement bathroom to the pantry room area in order to utilize space more realistically.

Madison Juvenile sets
Madison's overall look in concept art and storyboards has undergone numerous revisions since the project was first envisioned in September of 2015. The institution first envisioned for set design was a much colder building, one designed more consistently with a 60s-era adult maximum security building. As more information became available, the set designs were modified heavily to make the story's world and set pieces look closer to reality.

As of 2018, most of Madison's campus is either restricted to sets in The Sims 4 or else referred to using clips from Girls, Incarcerated as frames of reference. There have been attempts to make contact with individuals who were a part of the operation at the time, to improve accuracy of depiction for storyboarding. As of March of 2019, only Kiersten Malone has come forward showing interest in aiding with developing a virtual map. The 2018 "layout," inspired by the Netflix show, was condensed to a single building containing set pieces mostly of the gym and of Units 4 and 5.

Streets of Boonville/Gerosha
Although there was consideration to use The Sims 3 Create-a-World tool to make a scale model of Boonville, the idea was scrapped due to complexity and time constraints. Instead, it was decided that Google Street View would be the primary tool for navigating the real city in order to better understand the fictional one. Imaki's house and similar locations would be studied from this view, with the most important ones re-created in Sims software of some form. Clips from Realtor would be used for private homes when possible, similar to the process of making Erin's house.

Other
The construction site where Ciem, Purge-Flare, Frank Morvel, and Lava Tigre hold their final showdown is kept the same for storytelling purposes, even though it has been shown to be the Quality Liquor store in real life. Vanderburgh County Jail has also been considered for set design revision, following discovery of photos showing the layout of the building to be different from how it was originally depicted in Sims 3 concept art.