Building a cozy life sim, one day at a time
Heisei Days is an anime life sim set in late-90s Tokyo, built in Unity 6 with AI agents driving Unity and Blender. These are the working notes.
Why I’m building this
Inspired by cozy games like inKONBINI, Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing, and by the creative freedom of writing my own story and building my own world, I set out to make a game. I have no prior game development experience, but I'm a software engineer, so most of the fun has been in the engineering: planning the game mechanics and systems, getting every detail of the city layout right, and optimizing the world to maximize whimsy and minimize lag.
The log
Starting over: what three days taught me
Why I am putting this codebase aside and rebuilding from the foundations: what went wrong, what carries over, and how the next attempt will be slower, supervised, and built the engine's way.
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A measurement gate, five lots at once, and a street editor inside Unity
Draw calls finally measured, five shopfronts built in parallel, three look decisions from mock-up sheets, a Sims character rigged for Unity, and a build-mode editor that draws and bakes whole streets.
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Twenty-eight lots, one critic, and fifteen hours unattended
A build-and-review loop that scored every shopfront from screenshots, ran for fifteen hours without me, and built two streets.
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From a browser prototype to a walkable Heisei street
From a browser tab to Unity in thirteen hours: a shopping arcade, a convenience store, and a multi-room home with the real street outside its windows.
Read Day 1 →