What LifeSim players told us, and what we changed

"The pharmacy doesn't work. Two cashiers work there but it shows five, and they're from the bakery. This is the second time I'm starting again from scratch."

That came in through the feedback button in September, written in Russian. Two days later another player told us that tapping the staff of their car wash opened the supermarket's staff instead. Within five days we had four reports like these. Each one on its own sounded like a strange one-off. Side by side, they were clearly the same bug, and two of those four players had already restarted their game because of it.

This post is about that kind of thing: what LifeSim players have been telling us since the summer, and what we did with it. It draws on 744 answers to the survey inside the game, a few dozen emails, feedback sent through Google Play and the reviews on the store page, where we currently sit at 3.5 stars. Quotes from other languages are our own translations, and we've left out everyone's names.

The survey, in numbers

In August we added a short survey to the game: seven questions, a couple of follow-ups and a box at the end for anything else. It pays 30 gold the first time you answer. So far 744 players from 48 countries have filled it in, in 25 languages.

We asked	You answered
How does the game run on your phone?	Smooth 88%, some stutter 9%, laggy or barely playable 3%
How clear were your first few minutes?	Very clear 62%, mostly clear 29%, confusing or lost 9%
How do the graphics look to you?	Love them 51%, fine 39%, a bit plain or ugly 10%
How does earning money feel?	Just right 48%, too easy 37%, too slow 15%
Did you ever almost stop playing? (more than one answer allowed)	Waiting too long 37%, didn't know what to do 19%, too many ads 19%, too repetitive 13%, never 29%
What's the most fun part? (up to two)	Running shops 60%, working jobs 26%, buying land 24%, stock market 14%
Would you recommend LifeSim to a friend?	Yes 58%, maybe 36%, no 5%

Most people answered on their first day in the game, so this is a first impression. It tells us the start mostly works. It can't tell us whether LifeSim is still fun a month in, and the emails suggest that's where the harder problems are.

One shop, two identities

Back to the pharmacy. Every shop in your city has an ID number, and the game used to pick the next one by counting how many shops you owned. That only works as long as the count and the numbers agree. Close a shop, sell one to a rival or buy a rival's shop, and they drift apart. After any of those, the next shop you opened could be handed a number that already belonged to another of yours.

From then on the game treated the two shops as one. The new shop never got its own queue, so customers walked in and nothing was earned. The staff screen opened whichever of the pair it found first, which is how a pharmacy ended up with the bakery's cashiers. We fixed it on 23 September and the fix shipped soon after. We haven't had a report of it since.

Two more from the same week

One player wrote to us in Turkish that after tapping to enter their barber shop, they stayed on the main map while the game acted as if they were inside. Sleep did nothing. Only the exit button in the corner brought things back. Part of that was the bug above, sending them to the wrong shop. The rest was ours too: ten of our fifteen business types didn't have an inside you could visit, and for those the game laid an empty, invisible screen over the map. Everything looked normal and nothing responded.

In the survey, a player in Russia who was twenty days into their game couldn't buy any rival's business: "It still says bidding opens in 3 days, so I can't finish the quest to own 5 businesses and move on." They were right to be annoyed. The game counts how many days each shop has been trading, but it was only counting yours. Every rival stayed at day zero, always three days away from being for sale. Both of these were fixed the same day as the pharmacy.

Phones that struggle

88% of you said the game runs smoothly. Most of the rest had trouble when a shop got busy or when moving around the map. One review on Google Play in October was harder to read. The game froze so badly at launch that the player had to restart their phone: "I honestly thought it was a virus."

Since mid-October, LifeSim keeps an eye on how long your phone takes to draw each frame. If it's struggling, the game turns down the crowds, the traffic and the effects by itself, and turns them back up once things calm down. Shop pictures now load only the parts that are needed. And at the end of October we rebuilt the city ground out of tiles, which took its memory use from about 22 MB to 5 MB. That work isn't over. A player in Turkey wrote this month that their phone still gets hot, and that freeze at launch may be a separate problem we haven't tracked down yet.

Too fast and too slow, at the same time

This is the one that took us longest to understand. Asked how earning money feels, 37% said too easy and 15% said too slow. Asked whether they had ever nearly stopped playing, the most common answer, at 37%, was waiting too long.

The emails say both things as well. In September a player told us through Google Play that "the progress is toooo quick, I'm rich in an hour." This month someone wrote in Turkish: "I worked for two minutes and bought a shop with that money straight away. There could at least have been an apprentice stage." A few weeks into the game it flips. A player in the UK, 17 days in: "Hiring teller for 150M dollar is a joke." A player in France: "Too much waiting, it makes the game boring." And the energy bar came up again and again, most bluntly in a review on 9 November: "Running out of energy is ridiculous."

We don't think these are opposite complaints. The first hour hands out money quickly, then the game starts making you wait, mostly for energy and for customers. It's one pacing problem, seen from different days. We started with upgrade prices, which since late August are set by hand for each type of business rather than by a formula. Energy and the waits in the middle of the game come next. This one isn't solved yet.

Things you asked for that are in the game now

• In May one player sent us a long, careful email with five ideas, a stock market among them. The stock exchange arrived in August, and 14% of survey players now name it as one of the most fun parts of the game.
• "I would love to also be able to buy apartments or houses and rent them or live in them myself," a player in the US wrote in September. You now have a home of your own in a neighbourhood, with a choice of house designs and a yard to decorate. Renting isn't part of it.
• A Spanish-speaking player asked in August to see more about the staff they had hired. Later that month every employee got a staff file, where you can reward them, let them go and watch them get better at the job.

What we haven't fixed yet

Some of what you told us is still open, and it's only fair to list it.

• The theme park. Since October, players writing in Turkish, Indonesian and Portuguese have told us the same thing: there's a goal to build a theme park, and they can't find anywhere on the map to build it. The goal appears long before you can actually reach it. We want the game to point you to the next step you can really take, and that work is on our list.
• Portraits on top of the story. Two players writing in Arabic told us the character pictures cover the dialogue text. One said they didn't understand any of the story because of it. It's on our list, and we haven't got to it yet.
• Finding a house. Players writing in Korean have asked us twice where you buy a house. It's a fair question, and the game should answer it without an email.
• Ads. One in five survey players said ads nearly made them quit. Ads are what keep the game free, but we're testing where they show up.
• A bigger world. More land, a bigger map, more cities. One player asked for Adana. We'd like that too, but it's a big job and we don't have a date for it.

How to reach us

We read everything, some of it through a translator. We don't manage to answer every email, and we're sorry about that. Bug reports go onto our list in the player's own words, translated, because the exact wording is often the clue. The shop bug above only made sense once four of those reports sat next to each other.

The most useful report is the one you send with the feedback button inside the game. It adds your game version, your phone's system version and any errors from that session, plus a screenshot if you're reporting a bug, so we don't have to write back and ask. You can also email us at lifesim@gainpips.net. If you'd rather reply in public, this post is also on itch.io, with comments open. And if you haven't played for a while, LifeSim is on Google Play.