AnyLife started as a pretty clear objective: four weeks, ten hours a day, build the basics and ship something. No scope creep, no overthinking — just get concise features working and move. I got through it, but burned out fast afterward, which was more frustrating than I expected. After that came a quieter stretch — a month or two of polishing, small fixes, minor updates. And now there's an actual release on the horizon, which still feels a bit unreal.
Swift, SwiftUI, and three dead designs
The whole app is built in Swift and SwiftUI. I genuinely love Apple's design language — it's clean, versatile, and compared to something like building a UI in Python or C++ with a third-party library, it's in a different league. The problem is that when you have good tools and you care about the result, it becomes very easy to care too much. Trying to get the interface exactly right led to three complete overhauls. Not tweaks — full redesigns. Hours in Photoshop building out an interface, getting it to a point where it looked right, and then scrapping the whole thing because a different approach felt better. I don't fully regret it, but it was a pattern I had to eventually break out of and just commit.
Why this exists
The reason I started is pretty undramatic, honestly. I saw someone online going on about making their own app, and it reminded me of the time I used to spend on BitLife — and more specifically, the things that started to annoy me about it. The slow drip of minimal DLC, the ads, the sense that you're always a paywall away from the part of the game that's actually worth playing.
So I looked around at what else was out there. Other life simulators, a handful of them, and I found basically the same problems everywhere: fewer features, the same pay-to-play mechanics, ads, UI that felt like nobody had really sat down and thought about it. That combination of things annoyed me enough to actually do something about it instead of just complaining about it.
AnyLife is the result. It's obviously a starting point, there's a lot left to do, but I'm genuinely happy it exists.
Where it falls short right now
I want to be upfront about this. Life simulators that have been around for years are more complex than AnyLife is at launch — that's just the reality. All the work that got me to this point, and it's still a fraction of what something like BitLife has in terms of scenarios, depth, and interconnected systems. Right now it can feel more like a clicking simulator than a proper life sim, and I know that. There's a gap between what the game is trying to be and what's actually in it at the moment. I'm working on closing that, and I'm not pretending it's finished — that felt more honest than shipping it and saying nothing.
Community suggestions
One thing I was clear on early: this shouldn't be shaped entirely by what I personally find interesting. That's a quick way to end up with a game that one person loves and everyone else finds kind of odd. After launch, community input is going to matter a lot — there's a whole feature built around it. I want to know what people actually want to play, what's missing, what feels off. That feedback is going to drive where things go more than anything else.
The money side of things
At the moment I'm making somewhere around five cents an hour, if that. I'm fine with it for now — this was never going to be immediately profitable — but at some point the math has to work out. My current thinking for future content is a season pass model: something in the range of nine to twelve dollars that bundles six months of new content into a single, reasonable purchase. Not a subscription, not a constant stream of small transactions. One fair price for a chunk of actual work, bought when you feel like it.
The other part of that I care about: free players shouldn't feel left behind. Any paid content needs to sit alongside free updates, not replace them. The base game should keep getting better regardless of whether someone spends money, and the paid stuff should feel like a genuine addition rather than content that was held back.
One last thing
Over the years I've started a lot of projects. Dozens, probably. Most of them are still sitting on a hard drive somewhere, half-finished or abandoned when something else came up. AnyLife is the first one in a long time that actually made it out.
To everyone who downloaded it — thank you. Genuinely. It means a lot.