“It’s Like a Dollhouse on Your Screen” - My Little Life Dev On Its Core Design (2025)

My Little Life is a simulation game that lives at the bottom of a player's computer screen. While that could sound like a recipe for distraction, My Little Life is designed to be the opposite of a game that doesn't force interactions. After building a home, the player's character will take care of their basic needs like food, pursue and progress in one of several work-from-home careers, socialize, and even interact with other characters. It sounds like the ultimate slice-of-life game for anyone looking for a casual and relaxing experience where they can check in on their little person as much or as little as they want. Furthermore, My Little Life has various display options and more planned ones for players to interact with or watch it play out in the least intrusive ways possible, such as a transparent background as just one example.

Game Rant recently sat down with My Little Life solo developer Stevis (Stevie) Andrea from 9FingerGames to learn more about the design philosophy behind My Little Life. Andrea talked about why My Little Life is designed to sit at the bottom of the player's screen as "like a dollhouse," revealed more about the game's different display options, and much more. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Related

The Sims 4 Lovestruck Expansion Giving Away Free Items If You Purchase By September 5

The Sims 4 reveals its upcoming expansion pack, Lovestruck, and grants early-buyers the opportunity to unlock exclusive items for free.

1

My Little Life's Game Inspirations And Initial Concept

Q: How did the idea for My Little Life come about? Obviously, it’s quite different from what you’ve done before.

Andrea: The initial idea was because of Rusty’s Retirement. I joined a Discord with the dev of Rusty’s Retirement ​​​​​​and we've been friends for a long time. Even before that game was announced, I was kind of inspired by it quite a lot, so the initial concept was that. I wanted to do something similar to Rusty’s Retirement but in a way that was very different.

“It’s Like a Dollhouse on Your Screen” - My Little Life Dev On Its Core Design (2)

I really liked the idea of just having a persistent character on screen. It didn't really matter at that point what kind of character it was, or what that character was doing, or even if it was human or not, but that was how the initial idea came about. Then it obviously evolved into much more of a Sims-like, but initially, it was just kind of that Discord conversation that created it.

Why it's different from Heretic’s Fork and Zapling Bygone—I just play a lot of different games, so it makes sense to make a lot of different types of games as well. I also think the best way to learn new things is to try new things. As much as I would like to make a Zapling Bygone 2 or a Heretic’s Fork 2, I like new things. I like learning new things and throwing myself into a new genre is the best way to learn, I think.

Q: On X/Twitter, you talked about My Little Life as like a modern-day Tamagotchi. Could you maybe expand on that a bit and your thinking behind that?

Andrea: Yeah, I think that is a better description than a life sim, honestly. I mentioned the initial concept, just having something living on screen all the time, very much like a Tamagotchi, and I love the way Tamagotchis have managed to make the player kind of get this sentimental attachment to something. That's the kind of the feel I wanted, to have this persistent thing that kind of felt alive and felt like it had its own life. There is no other game apart from the Tamogotchis that I think has done that as well.

My Little Life As A Game That Sits At The Bottom Of Players' Screens

Q: Why was it important for you to have the game sit at the bottom of the screen versus a traditional format?

Andrea: Well, loads of people are working from home now. Pretty much like everyone in the games industry. Most office jobs, I feel like they’re at home and this was obviously since COVID, so yeah, people are just spending more time on the computer. There's so much screen real estate now because the resolution of screens has got bigger than it really needed to be.

When I'm working from home, and when I'm doing stuff on the computer, the distraction that’s in your pocket all the time, which is like TikTok and mobile games and all that. That is more distracting than having My Little Life on the screen, or even Rusty’s Retirement on the screen because these games are built in a way where they're not meant to be interacted with, in a way. They don't pop up with loud noises, saying, “Hey, you need to do something right now. Otherwise, your character is going to die.”

Nothing like that happens. It's built in a way to not be distracting, but to be just something fun to happen on your screen while you're thinking. The same way as like you're thinking about something at work, and you might look out the window for a minute while you're thinking. That's the time when I want somebody to look and watch the character just live out their own little life while they're thinking about something else.

“It’s Like a Dollhouse on Your Screen” - My Little Life Dev On Its Core Design (3)

It's not really a gimmick or anything like that. It's more really integral to the design of the game where I wouldn't spend all the time on screen at all times, but I don't want you to interact with it at all times. There's loads of stuff you can do in the game. There's loads of paths you can take your character and things you can place and like, modifications you can make, but it's never in your face that you have to do it otherwise there's consequences like a lot of other games do.

It's very chill, and I think that's why it fits at the bottom of the screen. If it was a full-screen game, it wouldn't make any sense because the player would just be looking at it and be like, “What do I do now?” The answer is nothing; do something else.

My Little Life's Main Character And Activities

Q: How does the character in the game typically spend their time? You were saying you don’t need to keep checking in with them, so they're presumably going about their own business getting on with things?

Andrea: Yeah, pretty much. It's a weird one, but the more detail I give about something like that, the more gamified it is—the less the player feels like it's making its own decisions, and they're not just following this pre-conceived path. The general kind of loop is that they fulfill their needs, which are eating, drinking, that kind of stuff. When their meter is high enough, they'll probably decide to work on their career. Say, if they’re a painter, they will go to the easel and paint the picture and get some money for that and increase their skills that way.

If the player placed walls or extended the home, then the character will then go build. Make sure that they're building the things that you place, building the walls you've placed or, if you buy a new bedside cabinet, they're going to go and grab it and deliver it. The three main things are reacting to the player, what they've done, and fulfilling their needs.

What I'm working on at the moment—it's not implemented yet, which I'm exploring as a third or fourth thing—is recreation. I'm thinking about making the career hours specific hours of the day because it gives the character more time to do random things like host parties, socialize, or do that fun stuff that humans do rather than just being this work machine that just works and eats.

3:22

Related

The Best Real Life Simulation Games

There is an impressive variety of life simulation games available, and these are easily the best out of all of them.

How Time Works In My Little Life

Q: How does time work in the game? Can you fast-forward time or does it just play out itself?

Andrea: It plays out itself. I haven't found a need to fast-forward time yet, simply because I don't like it in The Sims when you have two characters and one goes off to work, and they literally just disappear for hours while you're focused on the other character. I don't have that in this game. All the careers that I've chosen so far are all work-from-home. Like a painter would just do it or a streamer, and they’ll just do it on their computer. They're always on-screen, and that helps with juggling their needs.

The better food items you have, or the better bathtub you have, the less time they’ll need to focus on their needs and the more time they will be able to work on their career. That doesn't work if they leave the house, and because they don’t have to leave the house it means they also don’t need to fast-forward time.

Q: How much of the overall person’s life cycle do you get to see? Is it kind of quite condensed versus the birth-to-death type thing?

Andrea: Well, you hit the nail on the head when you said death. I don't want a timeline like that for the characters, because then there's a limiting factor. It goes back to not having to interact with the game all the time. I don't want the player to feel like they have to fulfill this little person's whole life dreams before they get old and die. Time or age, I guess, is frozen, so they last forever [laughs].

“It’s Like a Dollhouse on Your Screen” - My Little Life Dev On Its Core Design (5)

Careers And Home Building In My Little Life

Q: Could you talk about the different career options that players can choose between and the impact of choosing different ones?

Andrea: Careers are all work-from-home. Off the top of my head, there's painting, streaming, esports. I can’t think of all of them off the top of my head [laughs], but any career that you can imagine working from home and doing then, I end up adding them into the game. The more you work on the career and the better stats your character has, the more promotions they can gain. When they gain promotions, they earn more currency that can spend on better items and cooler items for the house. Then, when you max out the career, you unlock special items as well for the house. Kind of like a reward for being the best scientist or writer or whatever.

Q: Awesome. I've seen a clip of another character playing with the player’s main character as well as delivery guys popping up. What other characters can players encounter in the game?

Andrea: The way it works currently is you have a main character you start with. If you place the right combination of items, then you can recruit more, and those characters you recruit have all the same systems and functions as the main character. Their careers, their needs, their skills—they have everything.

You can designate zones for each character and those zones are basically there so you can create separate homes, if you wish to. They can live together. They can share a zone and they will interact with each other, but they prefer to use the items and spend more time in their own home than the other person's home.

The characters in that way are kind of duplicates of the first character in a way. There will be cooler stuff than that as well in terms of non-playable characters, but you can't really play the main characters—they kind of get on with their own thing, but there will be, like the mailman you mentioned. There will be some neighbors. There will be some fun interactions with other characters as well.

Related

Best Games To Play If You Like The Sims 4

From mobile games to Second Life, these are the best games for lovers of the Sims.

1

Q: Could you tell us a bit more about the home-building side of things? You mentioned you can have more than one for your characters as well.

Andrea: Yeah, so the playable area is actually really long. You can scroll left and right, pretty much as far as you like. You can create separate homes if you wish. If you look at it from a layer perspective, the first layer is like the base wall, and then you can do wallpaper, then you can put posters, then you can put furniture, and then you can put props on the furniture. That's the main building system. I know that's a very technical explanation [laughs], but yeah, you can place furniture, you can place posters, mirrors, stuff that goes on the walls; you can decorate however you want.

That's the main interaction you have with the game is building out the environment and then, according to what you build, and what the character interacts with, that's how they get more skills. That's how they progress their careers and things like that.

How Rusty's Retirement Inspired My Little Life And Display Screen Options

Q: You mentioned Rusty’s Retirement was one of your inspirations. Was there any was there anything specific about that game that inspired My Little Life? Any particular mechanics, design features, or anything like that?

Andrea: It's a very different game. The game itself is entirely different. The only thing that kind of shares is this mentality that is on the bottom of your screen. That seems like a small thing, but it's actually a huge thing because it is the philosophy behind the fact that the game is built not to be interacted with, in a way. It's the same way with Rusty's Retirement where it's mostly there to look at.

You spend 10% of your time building it, and then the rest of the time you spend doing other things and just looking at it, so that core philosophy is what's taken from Rusty’s Retirement and then that kind of informs the decisions in every part of the game design. It really does envelop everything in a way.

“It’s Like a Dollhouse on Your Screen” - My Little Life Dev On Its Core Design (7)

Q: Could you talk about the different display screen options for the game?

Andrea: There's the thinnest version on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. There's a medium version and a large version; the large version of a 1080p screen, I think takes up a third of it. I prefer the smaller versions because I like it less distracting, but you can switch between them at will. There's a square mode—I call it a camera mode—where it will just be a square in the corner of your screen and it will follow whichever character you're following.

I’m working on a vertical mode. I can't promise it yet, but I think all the systems I've built will work in vertical. I just haven't got there yet. That would be a different environment that would be more like a block of flats because it would go like that on the side of the screen rather than the bottom of your screen. The final kind of option you have, which you can toggle at will, is making the background completely transparent. I've been watching Netflix and having it with a transparent background; you can really have it on top of your screen while you do other stuff. It can be really even less intrusive that way.

My Little Life As A Relaxing Simulation Game And Future Plans

Q: It's like the ultimate multitasking as well, isn't it? You've also talked about it being a relaxing game experience. How do you feel about that versus the idea of multitasking? They can be two ideas that sit together, but obviously, it depends on how relaxing you find multitasking as well, if that makes sense.

Andrea: I kind of hinted at it in the previous answers, but the way it doesn't force interaction. The character is not going to die if you don't feed it. It can be as relaxing as you want, or you can do everything perfectly, but that's completely optional. At the end of the day, you could just launch the game, spend an hour making a perfect little home, and just leave it for the rest of time running if you like. It's as relaxing as you want it to be and as intense as you want it to be—it really depends on the user.

Related

Best Mobile Idle Games

Idle mobile games can be more useful than they look and these are the very best of the lot.

Q: That's awesome, and games are really quite time-consuming as well. Was that a factor in designing the game in terms of giving people an option to have something that maybe doesn't necessarily take a ton of time to get through?

Andrea: Yeah, I do think you're right, and it's why I've tended to make smaller games in the past. I think I'll continue to do smaller games in the future with low price points because that barrier to entry is the same reason I haven't really played Elden Ring yet. It's been years. Or the DLC. It's just that barrier to entry. Just opening up the map, and you're like, “All these things I need to do, I have a life to live. I haven't got time for this,” [laughs].

I wouldn't say it really informed the decision. But in the back of my mind, probably. I don't play long-form single-player games anymore for that reason. I think a lot of people probably have that same issue, especially when they're getting older now. Gamers are getting older, they have lives, they have kids.

Q: How do you think My Little Life kind of stands out from other life sims out there today or idle games?

Andrea: It's far less complicated and that's why I say it's relaxing or not stressful is because you really don't have to dig deep if you don't want to. You can just launch it, just keep it on your screen, and interact with it if you want to interact with it or don't if you don’t.

There's no weird microtransactions or I think The Sims has like 20 DLCs or something now, which is crazy. It's like you said, it's not a big factor. You’re not starting this whole new grand adventure. It's like a dollhouse on your screen that you can just play with when you want. That sets it apart in a big way and yeah, just the relaxing kind of chill nature to it, I think.

Q: Is there anything else that you'd like to add today or tell our readers?

Andrea: Wishlist on Steam, please. It’s the biggest thing you can do to help. If you want to join the Discord, we have like 20 playtesters at the moment, and we're opening up more testers. As the game gets more stable, we'll add more and more to allow the game to be the best it can be. I really want to make a community-driven game because, at the end of the day, I am making the game but you're the ones playing it.

The suggestions really do help and I'm thinking about doing a Kickstarter, simply because I just want to add loads and loads of content to the game in terms of more items, more interactive things. A lot of artwork, a lot of stuff. I'm thinking about doing a Kickstarter, but we'll see.

[END]

My Little Life is currently in development.

MORE: Most Influential Simulation Games

“It’s Like a Dollhouse on Your Screen” - My Little Life Dev On Its Core Design (2025)
Top Articles
Latest Posts
Recommended Articles
Article information

Author: Gregorio Kreiger

Last Updated:

Views: 5920

Rating: 4.7 / 5 (57 voted)

Reviews: 80% of readers found this page helpful

Author information

Name: Gregorio Kreiger

Birthday: 1994-12-18

Address: 89212 Tracey Ramp, Sunside, MT 08453-0951

Phone: +9014805370218

Job: Customer Designer

Hobby: Mountain biking, Orienteering, Hiking, Sewing, Backpacking, Mushroom hunting, Backpacking

Introduction: My name is Gregorio Kreiger, I am a tender, brainy, enthusiastic, combative, agreeable, gentle, gentle person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.