Daycare Simulator

A daycare to call your own.

It starts at 7:30 in the morning. The lights are off, the toy bins are half-empty, and you've got exactly one hour before the front door opens and the day really begins. You wipe down the tables, top up the snacks, lay out a few toys, and brace yourself. At 8:30, the parents arrive, and so do the kids.

DaycareSim is a first-person daycare management game where you run the whole place yourself. Not from a menu, not from a top-down map, but from the floor: kneeling down to soothe a crying baby, hauling crates of supplies across the room, keeping one eye on the clock and the other on the chaos. You're not managing a daycare from a distance. You're in it.

Every kid is different

The children come in three age groups, babies, crawlers, and toddlers, and none of them want the same thing. The littlest ones need to be picked up and held when they get upset, sometimes for a good while. Crawlers are mobile, curious, and into everything. Toddlers have opinions. Each group gets hungry, tired, bored, and fussy at its own pace, so a room full of mixed ages keeps you moving constantly, working out whose nap, snack, or meltdown comes first.

On your own, you can comfortably look after a handful of children at a time. Take on too many and things start to slip. A hungry baby here, a dirty floor there, and pretty soon it shows.

Run it like a business

Here's the thing: this is your daycare, and it should be making you money. After the kids go home each evening, you sit down at your laptop to handle the part of the job nobody sees, checking the books, ordering more food and supplies, and picking out new toys to keep the little ones entertained and the parents impressed.

Everything you do feeds your reputation. Happy children, a clean space, and a good variety of toys all push it upward, while letting standards slide drags it back down just as quickly. Reputation is the engine of the whole game. A strong one lets you charge more per child and brings more families to your door. A weak one does the opposite, and if it falls far enough, parents stop trusting you with their kids and take them somewhere else for good.

Reinvest your earnings and your little operation starts to grow. Hit the right milestones and you can bring on staff to share the load, with each new employee freeing you up to care for more children and pull in more income. What begins as a one-person room can turn into a real, bustling daycare.

Don't mix up the kids

And then there's pickup. At the end of every shift the parents come back through that same front door, one by one, to collect their children. The catch is simple and surprisingly nerve-wracking: you have to hand over the right child to the right parent. Get it right and another happy family heads home. Get it wrong, and let's just say that's not the kind of mistake a daycare can afford to make twice.

Coming soon

DaycareSim is in active development. Follow along as it grows, because there's a lot more on the way, and the doors are about to open.