How We Designed the World of Grandma Left Me a Building

Grandma Left Me a Building is a turn-based apartment management sim with no time pressure, 30-plus trait-driven tenants across four social tiers, and an economy of money, happiness and reputation. We designed it mood-first: warm and funny, then the systems.

When we started Grandma Left Me a Building, the first decision we made was a mood, before any mechanic. Most apartment and building management sims are excellent spreadsheets: precise, serious, a little cold. We wanted the opposite feeling out of the same genre, a management sim that is warm, funny, and a bit chaotic, where the pull is the strange cast of tenants in your building rather than an optimized balance sheet. Every other decision in the design followed from that one.

The problem we set out to solve

We love the deep management sims. Project Highrise and its relatives are some of the most satisfying systems in games. But most of them speak the same language: efficiency, throughput, a prestige number to climb. That is a real pleasure, and it is also a crowded shelf. So our pitch to ourselves was simple: keep the management loop, swap the tone. Take the genre’s satisfying core (find tenants, meet their needs, upgrade the building, grow a reputation) and run it through comedy instead of a calculator. Our own design brief says it plainly: the game starts calm and gets more chaotic as you grow, and the chaos is the point.

How do you build a game world around its characters?

Once the goal was “warm and funny,” the world designed itself: the building is a stage, and the tenants are the show. So we wrote the cast first. Grandma Left Me a Building has 30-plus tenants across four social tiers, from an opera singer who bursts into an aria in the elevator, to a philosopher who answers every question with “but why?”, to an eight-year-old who takes apart anything within reach and reassembles it correctly about a fifth of the time. Each tenant carries traits, and those traits talk to each other. The line we kept coming back to is G.K. Chesterton’s: “We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour.” Put the wrong two neighbours side by side and you get chaos; find the right pairing and the floor settles into peace. Placement is not decoration, it is the comedy engine.

How do you design chaos without stressing the player?

This is the part that took the most care. Chaos is a joy to watch and misery to be trapped in, so the loop is built to make the mess optional and the pace yours. The day is turn-based.

How a day works

1. Morning brings rent, events and tenant requests.
2. Action phase: place tenants, pick candidates from the realtor, buy upgrades from the builder.
3. Day ends with money, happiness and reputation updated plus a short summary.

No clock forces your hand, so you meet the day’s madness only when you are ready for it. The escalation is deliberate. Early on the building is quiet and legible, and as your reputation climbs you attract stranger tenants and wilder events. Growth makes the numbers bigger and the building funnier at the same time.

Keeping the chaos warm, not stressful

Tone is a design system too, and ours runs on contrast. The art is hand-drawn cartoon in a warm palette, orange and yellow and cream with a little green, and the soundtrack is low-key lo-fi, calm on purpose while the on-screen events get sillier. That gap between a chill loop and an absurd cast is where the humour lives. It also does real work: a building full of feuding, disassembling, aria-singing tenants could tip from funny into exhausting, so the soft look and the unhurried pace are there to keep it cozy no matter how strange the day gets.

The hardest part is the economy. Our biggest design risk, written down from the very start, is the narrow corridor between resource scarcity and frustration: tune it too tight and the game is stressful, too loose and it is boring. Getting a management sim to feel relaxed while its systems still carry real stakes is the problem we spend the most time on, and no amount of art or jokes solves it. It gets solved by playing the thing over and over until the pressure reads like a puzzle instead of a punishment.

Where it is now

Grandma Left Me a Building is still in development, and we are deep in exactly that tuning work. If you want to see how the trope that opens it plays out across the genre, we wrote about why so many games start with an inheritance, and if you want the player-side view of the systems above, here is our apartment management strategy guide. If a warm, funny, slightly chaotic building sim sounds like your kind of thing, you can wishlist it on Steam, which is the best way to hear when it is playable.