About This Game

A little life on your desktop

Doodlefolk turns your Windows desktop into a small world of curious characters. Your Doodles walk, jump, climb, grapple, ride windows, and react to your cursor while you work or unwind. Give them somewhere to sit, something to do, and a little room to surprise you.

Meet a cast with personality

Shape your Doodles with six personality traits, presets, likes, moods, and preferences they learn over time. Friendships, rivalries, romance, clubs, and families give each cast its own stories. Optional settings let you include babies and aging. Watch characters practise 14 skills, then explore their diaries, dreams, history, local sticker collections, and newspaper.

Customize names, colours, bodies, hats, and personalities. Keep multiple named casts and organize creations in your local Library, so you can return to a familiar group or start something new.

Make room for pets and play

Adopt dogs, cats, parrots, rabbits, and hamsters. Care for their needs, build bonds, teach tricks, groom them, and try different clothes. Furnish their surroundings with beds, seats, food, gardens, ponds, pools, vehicles, campfires, and lights.

There is plenty to get involved in: football, basketball, baseball, tennis, badminton, races, talent shows, skipping rope, trampolines, cursor games, sparring, fishing, gardening, local jobs, earned coins, school, forts, and festivals. Weather and seasons add variety to your little world. Fictional TVs, projectors, consoles, phones, and sketch computers provide built-in activities and content.

Doodlefolk includes cartoon fighting without blood or gore. Fighting and care settings are adjustable, and optional settings allow non-graphic permanent death and memorials.

Fit your routine

Use the Focus Timer, tasks, breaks, and reminders alongside your desktop companions. Capture local photos and short video clips (2–30 seconds, MP4 or GIF) in the Album. A short first-time setup, a first-day checklist, and hints help you find your way around.

Calm mode, colourblind team labels, quiet and sound controls, graphics settings, and battery-saving options let you tailor the experience. Gaming Pause steps aside automatically when a fullscreen game or app is in front; you can switch it to manual. Local position restoration is also opt-in.

Create something of your own

DoodleKit supports local, data-only JSON and SVG packs for objects, hats, characters, names, jokes, songs, town moods, festivals, starting scenarios, and simple behaviours. Build on the application's existing actions and use the validator to check your pack. Share your packs, or download other players', through Steam Workshop. Packs are activated after restarting Doodlefolk.

Help shape Early Access

Doodlefolk is growing with its community. When Early Access begins, we'd love your help finding issues, sharing ideas, and telling us what makes your desktop companions fun to spend time with. Your feedback will help guide fixes and priorities.

Community feedback will help guide development during Early Access. We plan to build on the desktop experience already available, and our priorities may change as players share what they enjoy and what needs work. See the Early Access answers above for our current plans and estimated timeline.

Online visits between towns are planned but not available yet, and there is no multiplayer. Optional connected extras include Steam Workshop, Steam Cloud, Twitch chat, and weekly Steam community goals.

Doodlefolk is made to keep running on your desktop, so Steam counts all the time it is open as playtime, including while it's paused or hidden. That includes the 2 hours of playtime in Steam's refund policy; if you're still deciding, quit from the tray icon when you aren't using it.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Doodlefolk was made by a small studio with help from AI coding assistance. They helped write and review the game's code and its text, such as dialogue. The Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Canadian French and French (France) translations are AI-assisted first drafts that native speakers have not reviewed yet. No AI image, voice, or music generators were used, and no generative AI runs while you play.