Dreams: something to do before school

A new life in OpenLifeSim starts at age one. Until now that meant five presses of Live another year with almost nothing in between. After that you got a whole life and no idea what to do with it.

Two holes

The first hole was the early game. A toddler can't work, buy anything or move out, so the first screen had one door that opened and four that didn't. Houses, cars and careers all opened at sixteen. Somebody trying the game for the first time met a baby and a long wait.

The second hole was the goal. The most common feedback I got was that a life had no purpose, and that it wasn't clear what to do at the start.

I wanted one feature that fixed both.

Where the idea came from

Children love to play and imagine. For an afternoon they're a doctor or a shop owner with a house and a car. And when it goes wrong, nothing much happens. The shop runs out of money and somebody finds more. Failure during playtime is limited, and that's what makes it fun to try things.

So that's what the first five years are now.

How a dream works

Until school starts, the child dreams. You play the real game as an imagined grown-up, with the same apps and the same prices. You start with a home, a car, a job and a lot of play money, and every app is open.

If a job asks for a skill you don't have, you can imagine you have it. The application still rolls like it would for anyone with those numbers, so what you learn in a dream stays true when you wake up.

When a dream runs short of money, a letter arrives from a relative the child made up, and it always covers the price. Great-Aunt Marigold is very generous.

Waking up

At six, school starts and the dream ends. The home, the car and the job you had in it get pinned to a corkboard above the bed, each with how far away it is in real life.

That board stays on your dashboard for the rest of the life, and it ticks a goal off when you reach it. A life has something to chase from the first screen.

What else is new

Dreams are part of 1.3 Chiron, which is in beta. Everything else that changed is on the changelog.