"Seek inspiration from people, city streets and poisons of the mind. Grow your passion, but take care of your sanity or succumb to madness".
A new life
Welcome to exploring the decadent 19th century alternative history, and a roguelite game about surviving as a classical artist in 19th century, while painting masterpieces.
A survival game, featuring feelings
You will be challenged by 66 unique feelings (each with a different effect), along with poverty and other wordly troubles. Hundreds of cards represent the psyche of your artist's mind, and life in Oportunia, the city known as the world capital of contemporary art.
A rich variety of interaction mechanics
All these artistic, amusing, horrible or lustful details of life are presented as hundreds of lovingly painted cards that can be combined, collected, talked or thought about, visited, read or interacted and so on, resulting in a vast diversity of results, creating new cards and new opportunities of interaction. The creation of this game was inspired by a cult classic of similar format, but different vibes.
Mortal challenges
Life of the artist is not easy. Poverty, physical ailments, sanity loss and other challenges regularly result in permadeath (a variety of permadeaths, beginning with dying to disease and ending with drinking oneself to death), followed by a tactful overview of your life (often miserable, addiction-fuelled, yet passionate) and legacy.
During your life, unpleasant feelings will evolve from bad to worse if not dealt with. You will have to battle conditions like frustration, anxiety, anger, guilt, sadness, suicidal thoughts, and multitudes of other issues, including habits, addictions and temptations of various kind.
Painting, and other pleasures
As an artist, you can paint your sufferings into spectacular masterpieces, or counter them with pleasant feelings such as love, pure delight or peace. If all else fails, you can always seek solace in the Bar Avenue establishments, hoping to drown the bleak thoughts in drink or more exotic soothments. Roguelite fans may enjoy the iron person mode.
18 different endings
You may win numerous minor victories and a selection of grand victories. To win the grand victory, you must create a painting that will change the world.
As your life evolves, unravels and expands in Nova Oportunia, life-changing secrets, ideas and experiences reach you. These can be thought about, developed, and in time, turned into the paintings that will change the world for thousands or millions of people, leaving a truly majestic legacy of your life.
Above illustration created by T. Viikman by hand (and without any AI), like the most of all ingame graphics (and images on this Steam page). Read below about the game's limited use of premade procedural visual variations based on historical free-use-licence art.
Free-use-licence-sourced 18-19th century art & procedural variations
Being professional artists ourselves (including traditional painters) it is extremely important for us to stress that we’re against unethical use of ai.
While every other part of Artist Life Simulator is drawn and painted by hand during multiple years of the development by a small team of three devs, the game contains also limited reproductions of historical 18/19th-century illustrations/paitings/materials and (in accordance with their licence, just like memes) their procedural versions (and versions of versions) for illustrating ingame oil paintings and situations that inspire the paintings.
The world was simpler when Artist Life Sim was in development. Practical “ai visuals” didn’t exist yet because they were too primitive to be considered problematic by anyone - but they did work as messy impressionist oil painting illustrations (while still needing months of manual work to become usable).
We hope - even if there’s a justified rage burning in your heart against ongoing misuse of AI- you differentiate our old indie passion project from products that (unlike ours) use AI unethically, irresponsibly or predatorily.
