A Game About Laundry (That's Not Really About Laundry) · Ben NorthmoreBen Northmore<br>Ben Northmore<br>Developer journal.

Engineering manager building useful things, automating the boring stuff, and sharing what I learn.<br>Wales, UK

I’m making a game about doing laundry. On paper, that sounds like the most boring premise I could have chosen.

I know how it reads: a management sim about spin cycles and detergent stock, a spreadsheet with a pastel UI, something you’d scroll past in a Steam sale and forget by lunchtime. But the idea won’t leave me alone.

How it started

My washing machine broke, which felt almost rude given that laundry is already my least favourite chore. I started going to the local laundrette instead and found myself watching a room full of people with their own reasons for being there, all going through different routines under the same fluorescent light.

I spoke to the owner once, a proper character who’d been in the same building long enough to know everyone’s business and sensible enough not to gossip about all of it. I left thinking there was a game in here somewhere, not because laundrettes are exotic but because the opposite was true, and I’d found the inspiration in the mundane.

The things people forget

While you’re waiting for a cycle to finish, you notice things: a crumpled receipt from a late-night petrol station, a child’s single glove, a note written in a hurry and forgotten in a jacket pocket. None of these are plot points on their own, just accidents and traces, but each one hints at an entire life you never see directly. I think that’s the part that got me: you only ever meet people through what they accidentally leave behind.

A laundrette at the end of the street

The game I’m building puts you in charge of a struggling laundrette you’ve inherited, not some gleaming startup fantasy but a tired place with a faulty dryer, regulars who’ve been coming here for years, and a till that never quite balances at the end of the week.

Early days. The machines aren’t in yet.

The business side is real: you’ll fix machines, manage cash flow, decide whether to stay open late for the night-shift workers. I want that loop to feel satisfying because there’s a pleasure in making a small, unglamorous thing run properly, even though the game isn’t really about laundry.

It’s about the people who walk through the door. In my notes so far there’s a widow who still washes her husband’s shirts because she can’t quite stop yet, a teenager who comes in every Thursday with the same hoodie and never makes eye contact, and a man who talks too much because his flat is too quiet. You learn them slowly, through pockets and routines and the small choices you make when someone is having a worse day than you: grief, hope, loneliness, and the small acts of kindness that don’t get announced or rewarded with achievements. The ordinary stuff that actually makes up a life.

Games, grief, and Zelda Online

I started building again after digging out my old Mega Drive and SNES, Sonic on one and Mario on the other. What kept surfacing were the evenings on the SNES with my mum, when she’d sit beside me for co-op and pretend not to notice when I was struggling with a level. She’s not here anymore, and I suppose part of returning to game dev has been admitting how much I miss sharing that with her. That’s where I first learned games could be a connector, bringing me closer to people and giving me somewhere to go when real life felt too heavy. Escapism, yes, but also company.

The first game I was building was Zelda Online, an MMORPG for a French company, and I loved it. Careers shifted, and somewhere along the way I lost the spark and stopped believing I’d ever make games again in any meaningful way.

This project is me revisiting that chapter without pretending I’m twenty again. I won’t be a full-time game developer, and that’s deliberate. It’s not a life I want for myself. I’ve seen what burnout and crunch do to people, and I’ve watched studios overcommit and underdeliver because that’s what the industry pushes them toward. I don’t want that weight on my shoulders again.

A passion project

What I have instead is a passion project, and whether I ever ship it I genuinely don’t know. Maybe. I’m finding the journey fun either way, and I’m not convinced everything has to be about the destination.

I’m still in early development. Most of what I’ve described lives in design docs and late-night notes rather than playable builds, the regulars aren’t fully formed yet, and the economy might be too punishing or too forgiving.

What keeps pulling me back is the idea that laundry might be one of the few mundane rituals almost everyone shares. Everyone ends up standing in front of a washing machine, waiting, which makes it an odd place to tell stories and probably part of the appeal.

What kinds of lives would you want to discover in a game like this? What would you hope to find in someone’s forgotten pocket, and what would break...