Heirloom, a life simulation game for iPhone

One life. The house was already full.

Join the beta on TestFlight

Free, for iPhone. The game runs from birth to the end of high school, and what comes after is still being built.

Why I built it

A life sim that keeps the receipts

The character creator, showing a full length figure above a grid of shirts to choose from.

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.

Nothing in it costs money, there are no advertisements and there is nothing to buy. I did not want to build another game that squeezes the people playing it.

You draw your own face and pick your own clothes before the first year starts.

What a year looks like

Press one button and a year goes by

These are real screens from the build that is on TestFlight today.

The life feed, showing a year's events as third person rows under an age heading, with an energy counter above and the stat bars below.
You press one button, a year goes by, and the year writes itself down.
A full screen card summarising five years of primary school, with a final grade and two labelled options to swipe between.
Some years stop and ask you something, and the answer stays on your record.
A father's page showing his drawn figure, his trait badges, a closeness bar, and a list of things you can do with him, each with an energy price.
Everybody has their own traits, their own closeness to you, and a price on your time.
The relationships screen listing the people in this life, each with a portrait and a closeness bar.
The people around you are a real list, and they drift if you leave them alone.
A school enrolment screen, offering classes with the energy each one costs every year and the energy left in the year.
You pick your own classes, and what they cost is the year you do not get back.
A character sheet showing the character's figure above four attribute bars with values, and the start of a skills section.
Attributes, skills, school and the traits you earned, all in one place.

What is underneath it

Four things it does that a life sim usually does not

Your traits are things you did

You are not born with a personality here. A trait arrives because of something you actually did: read enough books and you become curious, go enough years without a friend and you become a recluse. There are fourteen of them, and once you hold one it changes how conversations land, how school goes, and who is willing to lend you money. Everybody else in the game holds traits too, and theirs decide who they marry and whether it lasts.

The world moves without you

The people around you act with no input from you at all. They go to school, take jobs, get promoted and fired, marry, divorce, have children, fall ill and die, and their own traits drive all of it. Your sister's husband loses his job, and one year he is the one who comes to you for money. Your little sister may end up in your classes, or on your robotics team.

School, from six to eighteen

Primary school at six, middle school at eleven, high school at fifteen. You enrol in the classes yourself and you can watch the grade moving before the report card lands. High school has three schools you can end up in, nine subjects and thirty-six courses taken in sequence. There are three clubs with a room behind the door, robotics, debate and economics, each with four other students, an election you can lose, and in debate a round you play rather than watch.

Aspirations, and the energy they buy

An aspiration is a long ambition the game hands you, drawn partly from the traits you already hold, and it runs for years rather than a turn. Finishing one permanently raises your energy, which is the number of things you get to do in a year. Missing one costs you nothing except the years you spent on it.

The state of it

What is finished, and what is not

Heirloom is version 1.0 and it is a beta. What is built runs from birth to the end of high school, which is nineteen. After that the life keeps running, but work, money of your own, moving out and a family of your own are still being made. The game tells you this itself, with a card, on the birthday you reach the edge.

How to join

  1. Install TestFlight from the App Store. It is Apple's own free app, and it is how apps are tested before they are released.
  2. Tap the button below. It opens the Heirloom beta inside TestFlight.
  3. Tap Accept, then Install. Heirloom goes on your home screen like any other app.
  4. Open it and start a life. There is no account and nothing to sign in to.
Join the beta on TestFlight

You need an iPhone running iOS 17.0 or later. There is no iPad or Android version yet, and Android will come if enough people ask for it. When a new build goes out, TestFlight updates the app on your phone.

Joining through TestFlight means Apple collects information about you as a tester, including your device, your app version and crash reports. That is Apple's process rather than mine. The privacy policy sets out what I can and cannot see.

Before you install it

What is in the game, and what is not

Heirloom is about a whole life, so some of it is difficult.

In the game

  • Illness and recovery
  • Death, and the grief of everybody left
  • Divorce and family breakup
  • A storyline where you can copy somebody else's answers, and be caught
  • Insults, rivalries and falling out with people
  • Being left on your own
  • Borrowing money, and being refused

Not in the game

  • No gambling
  • No alcohol or drugs
  • No sexual content
  • No violence or horror
  • No swearing
  • No chat, no messaging and nothing other players can write
  • Nothing to buy, at any point

The app makes no network requests at all. No analytics, no advertising, no third party code, no account. Your save is a file on your own phone and it never leaves it, which also means the game works with no internet connection. This website collects nothing either, and sets no cookies.

Read the privacy policy