This Grand Life has now been fully released onto the main branch on Steam and Itch.io.

A big thank you to all the players who have been on this journey with me. We’ve grown our careers, bought our first homes, become landlords, started our own businesses and invested in stocks. We’ve been homeless, alcoholics, avid collectors and lottery winners.

If you’re looking for even more content, remember there’s Steam workshop support. Here you can find some mods like Vlade’s megamod, which has a large number of additional career paths like sports star and criminal.

Thanks for playing This Grand Life, I hope the game helps you in your real life in some little way!

Alpha 2.6 has been released. This is mostly a re-balancing and minor improvements update.

Now your business supervisors can auto-buy materials to the amount you set at the start of each week, as long as you have the money to afford it.

I also noticed that not many people bother to change their default business theme with Cans Of Paint, so each business will get its own colour theme now. You can still repaint it yourself if you don’t like the new defaults.

A useful addition for education is a new Teaching Tutors home service, available from the Small House and above. When this service is active, a part of your degree or diploma will be completed automatically at the end of each week. This costs quite a bit of money, but it helps automate the studying process for those who can afford it. I would suggest unsubscribing when the academic term is not running, otherwise you are just wasting money!

Alpha 2.6 Change log:

• Added freelance business supervisor auto-buying materials option
• Added Teaching Tutors home service to Small House and above
• Reduced auction fee from 5% to 3%
• Reduced effectiveness of electric scooter and small car
• Changed spouse income from Misc Income to Family Income
• Tweaked travel time modifier calculation
• Added travel time modifier display
• Workers no longer quit when you can’t afford wages, debt added instead
• Need to pay two week’s wages when firing employees
• Finished moving 99% of English into data files
• Added default freelance business themes
• Fixed education tooltip not displaying whether semester-only studying
• Slightly reduced average date time

Alpha 2.53 has been released, just in time for Valentine’s Day (almost). I started talking about the dating portion of the game in the last update. After some tweaking over the past week, here is how the family portion works.

Family

You can start a family even if you’re not married by activating the ‘Yahoo’ action with someone. All you need is a high enough relation.

Every time you Yahoo, your fun increases and there is a chance of a baby appearing. Once a Yahoo is successful, a new Family section will appear on the Social window.

Your newborn child’s relation with you is an overall measure of how well they are doing. If you don’t play with them or can’t afford their expenses, they will suffer. If they suffer too much, Child Services will take them away and you will be very sad. On the other hand, if you have high relations with your child on their birthday, you will get a happiness boost from seeing them grow up well.

Speaking of which, if you relationship with your spouse (husband/wife) falls low enough, you will get a few warnings. If you ignore the warning signs, you will be divorced. Divorce has severe consequences, just like in real life. I won’t spoil the surprise and let you discover it for yourself.

As your children grow older, they will become more expensive to raise. As you become wealthier, the cost will also increase. This is to simulate things like sending them to private school, polo lessons and whatever else rich children do (I have no idea).

When they finally reach 16 years old, you can kick them out of the house. At this point, the game calculates how many good and bad birthdays your child experienced. If they had a few good birthdays, you will get a permanent boost to happiness. This can be very useful in generating a steady trickle of lifetime happiness, especially if you manage to raise multiple children well. On the other hand, too many bad birthdays for your child and you get a permanent happiness decrease.

If your child has experienced too many bad birthdays by the time they reach 16, all is not lost. You can keep them at home to try offset the negative impact by giving them some good birthdays before they leave. However, note that the cost to raise them will continue to increase the longer they stay at home.

Modding Changes

There are also some changes that allow multiple overlapping mods at same time. The old system should still work so your current mods won’t break, but creators will have to update their mods to take advantage of the new system.

Changelog Alpha 2.50 – 2.53

• Expanded default names list
• Added Social section to profile window
• Added seeking date actions
• Added gift giving mechanics
• Added relationship score for each person
• Added relations change from dating
• Added call mechanics
• Added end of week social warnings
• Added child expenses calculation
• Added child actions
• Added location travel to date
• Added propose, marry and yahoo actions
• Added failure to pay child expenses consequence
• Implemented child being taken away for neglect
• Implemented child birthday happiness effect
• Implemented divorce mechanics
• Implemented forced childcare if no spouse
• Added Relationship Roundup subscription
• Added spouse expenses
• Added family statistics
• Added more portraits
• Removed log file being overwritten when game updated
• Spouse earnings now increase along with your wealth
• Spouse earnings are more random each week
• Added permanent happiness change event depending on child development
• Added combine tag for modding
• Modified all city location data to be compatible with new location modding
• Fixed broken possession unriding vehicle
• Removed Steam check for loading mods from mod folder

This update adds Amsterdam as a playable map and advanced city options to make each playthrough even more unique. Also a reminder that the game’s price will be increasing next week and the demo has been updated to the latest version.

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Let’s start with Amsterdam, a city famous for its coffee and canals! This map has three traits – Bicycle Paths, Coffee Shops and Relaxed. Its focus is on lots of fun but limited time.

Bicycle Paths make the new Motored Bicycle transport option 100% more effective. The Motored Bicycle is stealable unlike the Scooter and Car, so you have to consider that before purchasing one.

Coffee Shops adds the Consume Coffee action to certain eating establishments, which provides a large amount of fun for a relatively low cost.

The Relaxed map trait means you lose 10 hours each week from everyone taking longer to do things. It’s quite a big hit, which is designed to encourage the player to seek out time-efficient actions like Consume Coffee to recover needs faster.

The Canal is Amsterdam’s unique location and contains the Canal Cruise as another source of large amounts of fun. Here you can buy a Large Vase to start collecting Tulips. Considering the first ever economic bubble started in the Netherlands over Tulips, I thought this was a fitting collectible to add to the game.

Advanced City Options

Advanced city options are an addition I’m excited about. Once you think you’ve mastered the game, it’s time to dive into these settings to create a very different playthrough. They are meant for advanced players only, since they can severely unbalance your life if you’re not careful.

The simplest option is the currency setting, which is more of a cosmetic change to go with the new Amsterdam map. The other options make the game significantly easier or harder, depending on the life goals you have chosen.

You can set the Central Bank to be very incompetent or very vigilant. Above you can see the difference between the two extremes. In the top image with the incompetent Central Bank, the economy went from 15% to -5% inflation over a few years, which is absolutely insane. Remember your rent, wages, real estate, share portfolio etc are affected by this as well. The bottom image shows a much more competent Central Bank, and the economy is more stable (although not completely controllable).

You can also lower or raise your overall income tax rate by adjusting funding levels for different services. For example, setting the Police Service to be completely defunded will save you some taxes over your lifetime. However, this means criminals operate with impunity and your house has a 50% chance to be robbed pretty much all the time. They will even steal your casual clothes.

The Education and Healthcare funding levels can be similarly adjusted. The scales work exponentially, so the further you go from the default values in either direction the more extreme the experience. Defund everything and your taxes will be much lower, but be prepared to be constantly robbed while paying your massive education loan and avoiding getting sick at all costs. Overfund everything and your taxes will be much higher, can you afford rent from your remaining paycheck while studying your inexpensive degree?

Combined with the existing traits system, there are many possibilities for different playthroughs.

What’s Next?

There are more advanced city options I want to add for an even crazier life. I’ll also be experimenting with advanced character options. The work to move all translatable text into data files continues as well.

Alpha 2.3 Changelog

• Added Amsterdam map, street names and associated products
• Moved Celebrity Concerts to be city-specific
• Added map traits Bicycle Paths, Coffee Shops and Relaxed
• Added Motored Bicycle to Shopping Mall
• Fixed Electric Scooter reducing travel time more than stated
• Added Tulip collectibles
• Implemented event Mega Sale in Amsterdam
• Converted some popups into non-popups
• Made Custom Game default to random avatar
• More hard-coded English into data files
• Added Advanced Options page
• Added currency selection option
• Relabel Privilege for Traits and Education to Privilege Cost
• Added Central Bank Vigilance advanced option
• Slightly increased default health tax rate
• Added Police, Health and Education Funding advanced options
• Changed low health medical bill to a debt payment
• Added winning custom game internal check
• Changed Sold Objects in Income Statement to use object’s financial type instead
• Slightly increased chance of corporate bankruptcies