Frequently Asked Questions

This page is dedicated to answering frequently asked questions about Tiny Life. This list will likely grow in the future as more players ask more questions, so don’t hesitate to ask through the feedback form or on the Discord server!

💥 What should I do if I’m experiencing an issue with the game? #

If you’re having an issue with the game, like it crashing or being unable to start up, we recommend you check out the common issues page right here on the website! It lists a lot of issues commonly faced by players, as well as details (near the bottom of the page) how to report issues that you can’t find solutions to.

👶 How old do I have to be to play Tiny Life? Can I let my children play? #

Tiny Life is a game intended for all audiences, young and old!

Depending on the country you’re buying Tiny Life in, it may be rated as appropriate for people ages 6 and up, or ages 12 and up. This is due to a variety of references in the game that governments may deem inappropriate for children of differing ages. In our opinion, it’s important that you know about these references, but that you decide for yourself if your child is ready to be exposed to them.

Notable references are:

• Veiled nudity when Tinies shower, use the toilet, or fool around. Nudity is covered by a pixelated censor effect, below which the basic body shape is visible. There is no visible or censored genitalia.
• Minor references to alcohol, using the term “brew,” which can be consumed by adults.
• Intercourse, using the term “fooling around.” Adults can fool around consensually with other adults, which is also how to get pregnant.
• Abortion. Tinies can have an abortion, which is referred to as “ending pregnancy” in the game. Tinies may experience mood swings after ending their pregnancy, but their decisions will not be displayed negatively or condemned by the game or other Tinies.
• Death. When a Tiny dies (which may occur through starvation, having too much brew, exhaustion, and more), they fade out and a gravestone will appear. There is never a display of blood or gore.
• Mental health issues. While never explicitly addressed using clinical terms such as depression or anxiety, Tinies may start feeling very sad from major life events like the death of a loved one or an abortion.

🌈 How diverse or inclusive is Tiny Life? #

Diversity representation and inclusivity are extremely important to us! Tiny Life is created by a queer developer with a lot of influence from queer communities and people of color, as well as an interest in exploring representation of non-western cultures more thoroughly. When hiring freelance artists for Tiny Life’s themed Sets, we take care to create overlap between the freelancer’s cultural background and identity and the items they create.

All of this makes Tiny Life a game intended for everyone. While we think these features should be a given in all games that have character customization options, here are some things that still make Tiny Life stand out:

• A large variety of skin tones for your Tinies.
• The ability to select a Tiny’s gender identity, voice, reproductive abilities and clothing style independently of each other, as well as the ability to make Tinies asexual, aromantic or both.
• An ever-growing array of hairs and clothing items for everyone, including many afro-textured hairstyles, as well as items like durags and headscarves.

Unfortunately, Tiny Life only supports a single body type (or body shape) for each age group at the moment. For a pixelart game like Tiny Life to look consistent, each clothing item has to support each frame of each animation for each body type. For a very small team, this workload does not scale well. Because of this, we made the conscious decision to favor diverse and unique clothing items over diverse body types. In the future, we may offer the ability to select from a small variety of different body types, but this is not on our roadmap at the moment.

If you have any feedback to share, especially requests for clothing and build mode items from your culture, please don’t hesitate to reach out via the feedback form.

📊 How does the game’s full version differ from the demo? #

While playing the Tiny Life demo, you may notice informational boxes in various places around the game’s UI that are meant to give a general overview of the content that is unavailable in the demo. These boxes are a good way to see what features are waiting for you in the full game while playing the demo.

Alongside various smaller things like miscellaneous actions being unavailable in the demo, here is a list of major features that are only available in the game’s full version:

• A much larger variety of clothing, as well as furniture and other build mode items, including all items from Sets.
• Baby and elder life stages and all of the gameplay associated with them, including pregnancy.
• Gameplay features like Life Goals and various skills, including Woodworking, Drink Mixing and Tinkering, the latter of which also enables object upgrades.
• The ability select multiple worlds per save, as well as a variety of prebuilt worlds including the large Maple Plains City.
• The ability to export or import custom content, including households, lots and custom worlds, as well as the ability to create or install content mods.

Please note that saves you create in the demo carry over to the full game, meaning you can get started in the demo and then, after buying the full game, continue with your household or households and even add additional worlds to your existing save.

🎁 What are Sets? Do I have to pay for them? #

As the game’s second-to-rightmost options tab (which is also where you can find a list of all Sets) explains:

Sets are groups of game content themed around a certain topic. Most Sets feature designs and art created by an artist from the community. You can spot an item from a Set through the Set’s icon, which is displayed next to the item.

While the demo does not contain any Sets, the full version of the game ships with all existing Sets pre-installed, and all Sets released after you buy the game will automatically be included in free updates.

You can find a full list of the artists who contributed to Sets in the credits. If you’re interested in contributing your own art as a freelance commission, please reach out on the Discord server.

💸 Will there be paid DLC for the game? #

This largely depends on how Tiny Life sales perform over the next few years.

As a team, we’re largely against paid DLC, as a lot of the time, it doesn’t end up feeling “worth it” to players. That being said, depending on the financial situation, we may have to start selling small DLC (such as cosmetics, akin to what Sets currently serve as in the game), but we vow to never gate major gameplay features and/or inclusivity features behind a paywall.

If the reason you’d like to buy DLC for the game is supporting Tiny Life’s development, we recommend you check out the Ellpeck Games Patreon or Ko-fi pages. On there, you can find multiple paid monthly (or one-off) tiers that give you early access to sneak peeks for the game as well as early access to playable builds of future updates.

🎮 Will Tiny Life release for consoles? #

Yes, it will! Here’s an excerpt from our public roadmap:

Once Tiny Life leaves Early Access, its full release will also be available on consoles, including Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and possibly more. You’ll also be able to buy it on additional stores like GOG and the Epic Games Store.

Unfortunately, we don’t know when Tiny Life will be ready to leave Early Access yet. You can find more info about the timeline and other Early Access-related questions on the Steam page by opening the box in the “Early Access Game” section below the trailer.

📱 Will Tiny Life release for mobile devices like Android or iOS? #

Unfortunately, there are no plans for Tiny Life to release to mobile platforms like Android and iOS. In our opinion, Tiny Life’s gameplay and control scheme don’t lend themselves well to small screens and touch controls. Additionally, the mobile games market is very different from the desktop and console market, and we’re generally opposed to filling our games with advertisements or microtransactions. While not making the game free on mobile is an alternative, it has proven itself unsustainable for many games, as mobile players don’t tend to expect having to purchase a game.

🧠 Does Tiny Life use Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)? #

No. We are strictly against using GenAI for games, especially when it comes to paid products and especially when it comes to game art. All pixelart in Tiny Life is hand-drawn by Ell and set contributors, and all code for the game is written by hand.

As localizations for the game are community-sourced, unfinished versions of localizations to some languages may contain machine translation or AI-generated translation. While we generally discourage this practice, community members are free to use machine translation as a basis for creating first drafts of their translations.

🕑 When is the next update coming out? #

Unfortunately, we don’t really know! Tiny Life is developed by a solo developer, Ell, who is currently unable to work on Tiny Life full-time.

However, we try to be as open as we can about our development process and progress made for new features. Tiny Life’s devlogs regularly feature information and updates about current development, as well as how much time Ell currently has to work on new features.

If you have questions about future updates and what Ell is currently working on, feel free to ask on the Discord server at any time!

🥼 How do I add custom content to the game? #

If you’d like to add custom clothing, furniture, actions, personalitities or other gameplay features, you should check out the game’s C# modding API. Several mods have already been made and published for the game, and members of the Discord server are always eager and ready to help you get started if you’re struggling with your first mod.

If you’d like to publish custom households, lots, worlds or mods for the game, we recommend doing so through the game’s various export features as well as the Steam workshop if you own the game on Steam. To get custom content that other players made, see the getting custom content guide on the documentation site.

💎 Is Tiny Life inspired by The Sims? #

The short answer is: yes, very much so!

A lot of people seem to relate Tiny Life as a whole to The Sims (1), likely due to the fact that The Sims 1 is the only game in the series that also used an isometric camera rather than a perspective camera. In reality, Tiny Life is visually inspired by RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, an isometric game from the late 1990s that, while not actually using pixelart, has a very pixelart-like aesthetic when looked at at a glance. Ell actually hadn’t ever played The Sims 1 on PC up until a few years ago; he’d only played it on PlayStation 2 as a child.

However, Tiny Life’s gameplay was very largely inspired by The Sims 4, which is the game in the series that Ell, Tiny Life’s creator, has played by far the most. You can see this inspiration in the way that Tiny Life’s emotions, skills, personalities and action multi-tasking work.

👾 Is Tiny Life a demake of The Sims? #

A surprising amount of people, when describing the game, will say that Tiny Life is a demake of The Sims. Now, there’s a large variety of possible interpretations of that term, but to us, a demake has to be two things:

To us, a demake has to be created as if it were made for an older machine or an older generation of consoles, both in terms of visual style, and in terms of technical capabilities. While Tiny Life does have pixel graphics, it does not adhere to a limited color palette or maximum amount of colors on screen as machines of the 8-bit era would have done. Additionally, Tiny Life has a more complex Tiny AI than what machines from the time would have been able to simulate.

Additionally, demakes usually take very heavy inspiration from the games they’re “demaking,” so much so that they could arguably be called “the same game.” While it’s not our intention to put down the effort, passion and artistry that goes into the creation of demakes, we believe that Tiny Life deserves to stand on its own as a game.

🏡 What makes Tiny Life different from The Sims? What makes it unique? #

Uniqueness in game design, to us, is a whole kettle of fish. For one, games don’t have to necessarily be unique in some super-meaningful way to be good, or fun. This is the way Ell put the issue he has with this discussion a while back:

i personally think that dismissing games inspired by other games is an incredibly shallow perspective that discounts many of the greatest indie games ever made. stardew valley, for example, could be called a “knockoff of story of seasons” in a similar way, which very unfairly puts down a beautifully crafted masterpiece that revitalized an entire indie subgenre.

That being said, there are a bunch of things that make Tiny Life unique, though it’s really up to you to decide whether these things are relevant to your enjoyment of the game. Here are some of them:

• There’s a fully-simulated open world, which no Sims game features as of now. You may think of The Sims 3, but other Sims in that game, once they leave the “visible area,” so to speak, are not fully simulated. Tiny Life’s Tinies live full lives, even when you don’t currently see them because you’re not visiting their homes!
• Personalities are split up into major and minor categories, which allows personality types like “hates children,” as well as dietary choices like pescetarian or vegan, to affect Tinies’ lives without taking up a vital slot in their list of major personality types. Tiny Life’s personality gameplay also differs drastically from that of The Sims, and many personalities are unique to Tiny Life.
• Skill gameplay is largely different for many skills, and skills like Tinkering and the accompanying upgrade system, as well as the Cleaning skill, are very different from The Sims, where, in many instances, they don’t feature at all.
• Tiny Life is an indie game created by a queer developer. To many players, the ways indie games respond to player feedback, represent diversity, and engage in charitable causes feels less disingenuous than those of a large company.

That being said, you should make up your own mind about whether you think Tiny Life is unique enough (and whether that even matters to you as a player)! There’s a free demo available everywhere Tiny Life is sold, so you can check out many of the game’s features risk-free before deciding whether you’re ready to buy.