LIFE

An idle game about staying alive. It opens as small as a life does: two meters and one thing you can do, which is cry. By adulthood the board holds seven meters, three kinds of work, debt, and rent that climbs faster than your wages. In old age it shrinks again. A whole life takes about twenty minutes, and the clock only runs while the tab is open.

It tells you less than it knows

The meters are bars without numbers. A button shows the name of a thing, not its price. A fork gives you two sentences and no terms. An earlier version spelled out every cost on every button, and it turned into a spreadsheet about a life.

How it plays

• Childhood is the tutorial, and it doesn’t say so. Something unlocks every few years (play, asking why, friends, school, lying), each announced by one line in the log.
• Childhood decides what you can do later. Intellect, charisma, grit, attachment and burden build up early and gate adult work.
• Every click is a roll. You always pay the full cost, and what you get back varies.
• Thirteen forks, and each one has to be earned: college, a partner, marriage, children, divorce, a parent dying, buying somewhere, sheltered housing, retiring.
• Death draws a portrait. You get a cause, an age, an epitaph and a paragraph put together from the life you actually lived.

How it’s built

The whole game is one index.html with no build step, no dependencies and no framework. Progress saves to localStorage. All the numbers live in a CONFIG object and all the writing lives in WORDS and CONTENT. Three Node scripts run the real engine against a stub DOM:

• validate.js checks that every action has its prose and every panel fits its cell.
• smoke.js draws every screen once.
• harness.js plays hundreds of lives under scripted policies, so the balance is measured instead of guessed. Played carelessly, a life ends at a median of 67. Played carefully, the median is 73.