This is a story where you do something more terrifying than entering a haunted house, more dangerous than assaulting an alien horde, and more important than ruling a fantasy kingdom. You, and you alone, must turn your newborn baby into a functional adult. Will you be a tiger mom or a helicopter dad? Can you raise a child through eighteen years of humor and heartache with nothing on your side except a little patience and a lot of love? It’s a fun and unique experience designed for potential parents of all ages!
It’s 25% off until October 7th!
The Parenting Simulator is a lighthearted 189,000 word interactive slice-of-life novel by Matt Simpson, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
Experience over 60 scenes designed to touch on events both major and minor in your digital offspring’s life.
Overcome potty training, bullies, and the dreaded driving test!
Live the wild emotional rollercoaster of raising a child as you go from birth to high school graduation.
Be the main role model in their life, as every little thing you do can have consequences that reverberate through the years.
Maintain relationships with friends and family or burn your bridges to spare you and your little one further heartache.
Watch your child grow and change from the choices you make.
Find out who they become through numerous possible endings!
Matt Simpson developed this game using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice interactive novels like these. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. Write your own game and Hosted Games will publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.
So happy to finally see this released! If anyone reading is on the fence about buying this because it’s about children, let me assure you that you’ll love it. As someone who doesn’t like kids, I loved the demo of this game!
Thanks so much! I appreciate everything you did to help it get here. Ditto for everyone else in the forum that posted, tested, harangued, nitpicked, and just generally provided their time and effort to make TPS what it is today. And a big thanks to CoG’s team for everything they do to make Hosted Games available and accessible to us as a platform.
Yep, I’m pretty excited to see how it does. Glad you’re here, Oliver. You were and are an absolute beast of a beta tester, truly worthy of your username.
I would be remiss to let this thread go any longer without giving a specific shoutout to @Isa whose art really helps encapsulate 189,000 words in just a few brief images. I really wish I had an Android phone just to be able to see that pacifier icon every day.
It’s hard to find on the Play Store without the link, but that always happens with CoG and HG releases; for the first day or so, no search whatsoever actually shows the game (even one specifically for the title itself), and the installs display as 0 even when you know people have downloaded it based on the reviews. Not sure why but at least it should resolve by around this time tomorrow if not earlier.
I just finished my first playthrough, and I absolutely adored this game. I love kids and one of my dreams is to be a parent, and this experience was so fulfilling. I cried, I smiled, I actually felt like this was my child going through life. A+ work.
My only two gripes are when you explore deeper into why you’re a single parent, I wish there was a same-sex option for talking about your child’s other parent.
Second gripe is not being able to romance anyone. It felt weird just being a single parent my child’s entire life. It would be nice to have the option to marry someone else, and see how my child deals with a new parental figure coming into the picture.
Other than that, I loved the game. Absolute masterpiece.
Congrats @hustlertwo! I still love all the different endings (and all the achievements!) and how the writing never loses its charm even during the more serious moments. This really is such a fun and replayable game.
With release achieved, congrats are in order, @hustlertwo …
The length of the game is deceptive in its relation to its replayability. I hope this becomes a cited point in your reviews, as it deserves to be a highlighted feature as much as the word count does.
Hi! It means a lot to hear how much the story impacted you. As for the issues you mentioned, they definitely came up during testing. I went in-depth about it on the WIP thread, and there are a lot of reasons at play, but the short answer is that I wanted to keep the focus on parenting. Adding another parent meant you either had to run all your decisions through them, which is repetitive and would involve a lot of writing the people who stay single will never see, or just make all the parenting calls yourself anyhow, which is unrealistic and in real life would definitely end up unlocking a divorce story event later on.
That said, if this does well I have a followup planned that might end up focusing more on the push and pull of having a spouse and multiple children and how difficult it is to make enough time for everyone. Instead of taking place over a lifetime it would likely just be a glimpse at a single year. And while it is not a direct sequel to Parenting, it would definitely be connected. More than that I cannot say.
As for the replayability, what can I say? I set out to make a game with a lot less spread than NPT did and failed utterly. I can’t seem to get that words per playthrough rate above 25% for the life of me.
This was an emotional roller coaster. I loved it. Since i still live with my parents i finally understand the amount of chouces they r faced with and maybe understand them a little better. So thank u for the experience:sparkles:
I still love all the different endings (and all the achievements!) and how the writing never loses its charm even during the more serious moments. This really is such a fun and replayable game.