2026 · Game design & development
LifeRunner.io
A strategy-based life simulation game where time, energy, and money are limited, and the point is to feel the tradeoffs, not to win.
- Game design
- Behavioral economics
- EdTech
Overview
LifeRunner.io is a strategy-based life simulation game that asks how everyday decisions compound into long-term outcomes. Players manage income, expenses, education, relationships, and major life choices through a card-driven system where time, energy, and money are all limited resources.
The design
The point of the game isn’t to win. It’s to experiment with different life paths and feel the tradeoffs between financial success, happiness, health, and personal growth, outcomes that are easy to gesture at in the abstract and surprisingly hard to weigh in real time.
The mechanics make those tradeoffs legible:
- Cards as discrete decisions, each with visible costs and downstream effects.
- Three constrained currencies (time, energy, and money), so every choice displaces something else.
- Multiple endings, none of them the “right” one.
What it combines
LifeRunner sits at the intersection of three things I keep coming back to: game design (how to make consequences feel earned), behavioral economics (how people actually weigh present vs future value), and educational technology (how to teach decision-making without lecturing). The goal is an interactive way of learning real-world decision-making, closer to a flight simulator for life choices than a quiz.