Hi! This is the devlog for PingLife, a life sim that plays out on your phone. The web beta went live on itch today: https://pinglife.itch.io/pinglife

Where it stands

• 1,200+ events, from your first phone at 14 to your last years
• 5 languages: English, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch
• Life of the Day: the same life for everyone, so you can compare

A few design decisions

• Ignoring is a choice. When you skip a year, every unanswered message gets resolved for you, usually not in your favour.
• People remember. What you tell someone changes how close you are and how they react later.
• Rarity is measured, not guessed. I simulated 20,000 random lives to set how rare each title in the album is.

What's next: looking at where players stop, and fixing that first. After that, the iPhone/Android app.

I'll post updates in this thread. If you have played it, where did you stop?

Day 3 on itch, a quick update.

• In the first days the cover was shown 1,037 times and only 1.83% of people clicked it. It looked like an app screenshot, pale blue, and next to the other covers in the browse grid it just disappeared.
• So today I made a new one: brighter colors, a bigger name, and one real notification from the game ("I saw your screen at dinner. Who is Mateo and why are there 46 hearts?"). If you hover it in the browse grid, it plays a short loop of that chat.
• 48 people played it in the browser so far, and the first comment on the page was "Played through a whole life", which honestly made my day.

​

Next I'm looking at where players stop in the first minute. If you tried it, what made you close the tab?