For many years I have dreamt of working on a life simulator. I've always found The Sims and others lacking the depth I crave that has only been sated by text based sims such as InstLife and more recently BitLife. Despite this I still have always wanted a 3D, third person life simulator focused on depth and not on sending your virtual friend to work whilst you float in the sky at home fast forwarding. Today I started prototyping a simulator for my ideal game.

The concept

To start off with; this is foremost a passion project and the prototype (or eventual game) certainly will not be everyone's cup of tea. In fact I'm willing to bet it is most likely a small subset of people interested in life simulator games with mechanical realism. Now I keep mentioning "depth" and "mechanical realism" but what is that? Well essentially I want a virtual world that mimics the normal world... Working, food shopping, clothes shopping, furniture shopping, travel to and from places, going for meals, visiting family and relatives, setting up a business etc. I want this to feel somewhat authentic to the actual experience. I should clarify this is single player and in no way a metaverse clone. Of course there will be limitations to this rule; there will be menus floating in mid-air and building is something I still haven't fully fleshed out but essentially I want a virtual world where if you have a job you need to wake up at 8am, grab breakfast either at a store if you have money or go to the kitchen and make it then walk down to the train station, buy a ticket, sit on the massively overcrowded train, get to work, actual have some user input into working and so on.

Why now?

As mentioned before; this has been an idea I've had for years so why start now? Well I've got a good grasp on Unity now and think I could potentially tackle something like this with help from a few others. For now it will just be a small prototype that I'll build on from time to time but I do hope to convert this into a full project some day.