With the last ever beta update releasing at the end of last year, a sort of new era has started for Tiny Life and its development: The release era, if you will. Steam Next Fest is also coming up in February, and Tiny Life will be taking part in it. With all of these things happening, there are a few pieces of news we want to share with you to prepare you for what’s ahead.

The Tiny Life Demo

Up until now, you were able to download the game’s public beta on itch (for a price of your choosing) or on Steam (as the demo application that was linked to the Tiny Life store page). However, over the last month or so, we’ve been hard at work getting the actual true Tiny Life Demo ready for you.

The demo will feature most of the game’s regular content, with a few caveats that are (obviously) meant to incentivize buying the full game if you’re enjoying the demo enough to warrant spending money on Tiny Life. While this is not 100% final yet, here are some key differences between the Tiny Life demo and the Early Access version, which will release some time after Steam Next Fest.

• The demo will ship with a single, very small world called Demoville. Demoville has five lots available, four of which have pre-built content on them. You’ll be able to shape and edit each lot as you want, just like in the full game, though.
• The demo will not feature the ability to access any custom content or mods. The demo won’t allow exporting or importing custom lots, households, or worlds. However, once you get the full game, you’ll be able to transfer your demo save files to it and continue working on the lots and households you started in the demo.
• The demo will not contain any content from current or future Sets. For those of you who aren’t in the loop, Sets are groups of themed content whose art was created by a member of the community. The sets currently in the game are the Woodlands Set, the Familiar Attire Set, and the Fitness Set. The Early Access version will ship with all current and future Sets included without any additional downloads or payments necessary.

While designing the demo, we wanted to make sure that players can still enjoy playing the demo without any time restrictions (which is a popular model for demos). Instead, we decided to limit the amount of content available compared to the full game. We hope this’ll strike a good balance between the demo being too lackluster and too similar in scope to the full game.

The End of the Beta

With Steam Next Fest coming up in February, it’ll soon be time to retire the public beta for good. Right now, you can still download it on Steam (by downloading the demo-it’s really just the public beta in disguise, as previously discussed) or on itch.

This won’t be the case for much longer, though. We plan to replace the public beta on both platforms with the official demo before the end of January.

The exact time we do this will probably be revealed a few days beforehand on the game’s Twitter and Discord, so if you want to keep up to date with it, those are the places to do so. Once the demo is released, there’ll also be another devlog post on itch and on Steam, as well as another newsletter e-mail as always.

After this switch, the public beta won’t be publicly available anymore. Like, ever. If you want to be able to still play the public beta until the game’s Early Access release (and the demo isn’t good enough for you), you should download it now and keep it safely.

The Store Situation

Tiny Life is currently available on itch and on Steam, and this won’t change when we publish the beta or when we release the Early Access version. Our current plans are as follows, though again, we can’t guarantee that it’ll happen exactly like this until it actually does.

Steam

• Tiny Life Early Access will be available (for a price we’re not ready to disclose) through the game’s Steam page, which is the same page that the game currently has.
• The Tiny Life Demo will be available for free, from the same Steam page, by clicking the “Download Tiny Life Demo” button, in line with other Steam titles that have demos.

itch.io

• Tiny Life Early Access will be available for the same price as on Steam, with the added ability to pay more if you’re feeling generous.
• The Tiny Life Demo will be available to download for free.
• People who bought the game on itch before it was available on Steam will get a Steam key added to their itch account automatically when the Early Access version is released. This behavior won’t continue after release.

We realize the current store situation is a little confusing, especially since the public beta is currently masquerading as the game’s demo on Steam. Unfortunately, we had to do it this way due to Steam-internal limitations. However, when the beta is switched out with the demo, and when the Early Access version is released, everything should go back to being pretty simple to find, buy and download.