The most engaging life sim
For iPhone. Your traits come from what you did, your family carries on whether you speak to them or not, and a whole city goes to work without you.
The Discord is where the builds go out.
- 10,000
- people living in your city
- 14
- traits, and you earn all of them
- 6 to 19
- school, graded every year
- 1
- person building it
Real screens from the build on TestFlight
What it actually looks like
Why I built it
A life sim that keeps the receipts
I grew up on Spore and The Sims, and I played a lot of BitLife. The format is right: a whole life, a year at a time, on a phone. What I wanted was for the choices to carry weight afterwards. So in Heirloom a decision you made at eight is still on your record at eighteen, the family around you keeps living whether you speak to them or not, and the game will let a life go badly.
It is harder than it looks. You get ten things you can do in a year, and that is the whole budget. Talking to your sister costs one. Reading a book costs five. Nobody can keep everybody close, and the game is largely about who you decide to lose.
The Discord is where the builds go out
It is also where I find out what is broken.
New builds, the day they go out
I post every build in the server with what changed and what I managed to break on the way. There is no mailing list and nothing to install first.
A challenge every week
One goal, everyone playing the same one. Get into Harbard as many times as you can, or finish the most books. The scores go on a board inside the game.
You can change what I build next
A lot of what is in the game started as somebody saying something in a thread. The car trade, the homeless system and the film career all came from there.
I am in there
No support queue and no community manager. Tell me a bug and it is usually gone by the next build.
You do not need it to play. It is just where everything happens.
What is underneath it
Four things it does that a life sim usually does not
Traits
Your personality is what you did
You are not born with one. Read enough books and you become curious. Go enough years without a friend and you become a recluse. There are fourteen, and once you have one it changes how conversations land, how school goes, and who is willing to lend you money.
The city
Ten thousand people who have never heard of you
The city runs whether you look at it or not. People take jobs, get promoted, buy cars and houses, and retire. Four dealerships compete for their money, three studios green light films, four estate agencies bid against each other, and a bank sets the rate off measured inflation. You can get a job inside any of it.
Work
From the sales floor to the director's chair
Start as a salesperson and work up. Haggle a real customer down, run the import desk, manage a branch and the people on it. Or take the other ladder, casting director then writer then director, and shoot your own film scene by scene before sitting through the reviews.
What you own
A house, a mortgage, and everybody in a room
Buy a home, take the loan, put your family in the rooms. Renovate it and sell it on, or let it out while the work is done. Cars wear out and get traded in. Miss the rent twice and you are on the street, where there is a whole system waiting for you.
Before you install it
Where the game actually is
Heirloom is version 1.0 and it is a beta. It runs from birth through school, then work, a car, a home and a family of your own. College is the part I am building now.
You need an iPhone running iOS 17.0 or later. There is no iPad or Android version yet.
- No account and no sign in. Your save is a file on your own phone and it never leaves it, so the game works with no connection.
- The app sends anonymous analytics about which parts of the game get played. Nothing you type goes with them.
- The weekly challenges are the one thing that leaves your phone, and only if you join one. The nickname and character you pick are shown to other players on the leaderboard.
- Some of it is difficult. Illness, death and the grief after it, divorce, rivalries, and being left on your own.
- No gambling, no alcohol or drugs, no sexual content, no violence and no swearing.
- This website sets no cookies and collects nothing.
The privacy policy has the detail.
Start a life. See how far it gets.
The beta is open. Come in, take a build, and tell me what breaks.