Second Floor

The idea

Two weeks on the second floor of an apartment building. Your neighbours are a barista who plays music, an ER night nurse, the baker downstairs and a tattoo artist from round the corner, and Dot, the landlord, has a rooftop party planned for the second Friday. Second Floor is a small slice-of-life dating sim about the people next door.

What it is

• A free-roam dating sim: four romance routes and six endings, each route with seven story beats, a date and a "one year later" epilogue
• Dot's water-tower side quest, and her rooftop party as the finale
• Sketch strangers in the park to build Confidence, and buy flowers, wine and paper at the corner shop
• A phone with quests, texts and people, and painted characters and backgrounds for every place at four times of day
• For adults: every character is an adult. Intimate scenes fade to black by default, with a toned-down option and an opt-in explicit level with its own illustrations

Built with

• Ren'Py 8.5.3, on an engine shared with Pinewater, Under Inkwell and The Lantern House
• The story is written as data in a JavaScript browser prototype and exported to Ren'Py, and a validator plays thousands of simulated weeks to check that every scene and ending can be reached
• Written and built with Claude Code
• Art painted locally with Stable Diffusion through SwarmUI, over the game's own drawn sprites

Status

In development, at version 1.1. Not released yet. Nova, the tattoo artist, now has a spin-off of her own: Under Inkwell, seven days in a fallout shelter under her studio.