Living House
STATUS
PITCH
“You are the building. Residents decorate you. You decide what stays.”
STATS
DESCRIPTION
What it is. Living House is a cozy fairytale idle game for mobile. The player isn't a builder, decorator, or city manager — they are the building itself. From a single hut to a sprawling castle, the building grows over real-time days as autonomous residents arrive and decorate it according to their own taste. The player's role is curatorial: approve, replace, freeze, or sabotage what each resident proposes. The building's character emerges from a long sequence of small refusals.
What's interesting about it. Most decoration games hand the player a paint-bucket. Living House inverts that. Residents are not units — they're characters with names, signature repertoires, and quirks. A Legend tilemaker only works on moonlit nights. A Master wallpaperer freezes one piece of work as a permanent style anchor; everyone else adapts around it. One veto triggers a cascade: the floor changes, then the ceiling adjusts, then the windows reconsider. Six zoom levels run from a wide neighborhood view down into the microcosm of beetles and tiny lantern-bugs living inside the walls — and any of them, if observed long enough without being chased away, can become a pet with its own mechanic. Permeability turns the daily session loop into a real choice: an open window lets the sun warm the room, but a passing rain leaves the wallpaper damp by morning.
Where it stands. Concept stage with a full design package: four interlocking documents totaling roughly twenty pages of prose, diagrams, and tables — covering the core loop, resident systems, spatial architecture, and what a player actually does in a 60-second morning session. Tech stack chosen (Unity 6 + URP, portrait mobile, single 3D scene with orthographic zoom). Next step is a vertical slice: one room, three professions, working zoom, the cascade mechanic, and one micro-pet.
What I'm exploring. The hardest open problem is the simulation of taste. Each resident needs to make decoration choices that feel personal rather than random — driven by traits, the location, neighboring work, mood, and history — without becoming so complex that it drifts away from the player's intent. The plan is to start with a single profession (wallpaperer), build a tag-and-weight system, see how it feels, and grow from there.
CORE MECHANICS
Residents propose; you approve, replace, freeze, or sabotage. Sabotage is visual: small things peel themselves off, large things dissolve in a soft puff of magic.
Pinch-to-zoom from neighborhood to microcosm. Six levels, no mode switching, no menus. Double-tap dives a level for one-handed play.
Each profession watches one neighbor in a closed pentagon. One veto ripples through up to four adjacent works before naturally damping out.
Rare residents arrive with a signature repertoire of three to five named styles. Freezing their work makes it a permanent anchor; everyone else adapts around them.
Collecting Legends from different professions who share a theme (Lunar, Gothic, Eastern, Mushroom, Steampunk-Tale) unlocks an emergent visual effect — moonlight that only glows at night, vines that bloom on the right wall.
Windows, doors, chimney, cellar can be open or closed. Open invites the world in: sun, neighbors, wandering animals — but also rain, dust, the boy next door with a piece of charcoal.
Tiny creatures live in the cracks. Ignored, they slowly age the building. Observed long enough, one becomes a pet with a real mechanic — a lantern-beetle that lights a room, a cat that calms restless residents, a mouse that finds hidden materials.
Buildings don't level up. They accumulate a biography. A fire scars a wing into a ruin where unique residents move in. A child's charcoal drawing left for a week becomes part of the wall a Legend wallpaperer will design around.
Visit neighbors, gather their building's overflow like berries in a forest. Leave a flower. Drop a rare material. No competition, no leaderboards.