A love letter to human work. Made almost entirely with AI.
SaltaVidas is a free-to-play, browser-based idle life simulator where you live a full life from age 18 to whenever your number is up — and then inhabit your descendants and do it all over again. Work your way up from a broke 18-year-old to whatever kind of person you choose to become. Manage finances, build a family, dodge curveballs, and pass something on. It's idle, it's incremental, and honestly it gets a little philosophical if you let it.
Play SaltaVidas Free →SaltaVidas lets you experience 250+ human careers — from fast food to surgeon to truck driver to Supreme Court justice. The story art, activity scenes, event narratives, and pixel environments throughout the game were generated by AI. Thoughtfully directed, curated, and occasionally argued with by a human, but generated by AI nonetheless.
The same technology that is, with a completely straight face, threatening to automate away a significant chunk of those 250+ jobs.
We're not wringing our hands about it. We're making a game.
SaltaVidas was designed and built by Lou Romero (Louis on the résumé, Lou everywhere else — he'll answer to either but only one of them sounds like someone you'd actually want to have a conversation with). Lou is a former software engineer who held TS/SCI clearances in two US military branches, managed 40,000+ server racks at Uber, spent two years as a Software Build Engineer at Apple, and launched his own MSP consultancy in late 2025. He is now, paradoxically, more technically productive than at any point in his career. He is also, by any conventional labor market measure, significantly underemployed. He holds a Class A CDL (earned it, rarely uses it). He's over 50. He's figuring out what comes next. He misses being more employed. He does not miss the meetings.
Lou served enlisted in both the Air Force (9th Intelligence Squadron, Beale AFB — classified communications and systems) and the Army Reserves (Western Information Operations Center — cyber defense), both with TS/SCI clearances, because apparently one branch wasn't a complete picture. He received an Army Achievement Medal for removing the Blaster worm from hundreds of DoD servers in 2003, which is either a footnote in IT history or a genuine highlight reel moment, depending on how old you are. He is also a private pilot, though not because of the Air Force service — Lou got that license afterward, as a civilian, on his own dime, which he acknowledges was a choice.
Lou is also a writer, a cook, a painter, a gardener, a sailor, and a motorcyclist. He draws, plays piano and trumpet (the flute is a current project), sings in a choir, plays in a church band, and games. He's built things with his hands — woodwork, construction, software, apparently video games. He has raised chickens and built their coop himself to proper house framing and construction standards, which is either deeply respectable or a sign that the chickens were getting a better deal than he was. He once painted a full Detroit Pistons basketball court in his driveway — 2005 era, to spec — which suggests a level of commitment to detail that explains a lot about this game. He is a grandfather, a husband, and by all available accounts a general nice guy.
The point is not that Lou's résumé doesn't add up. It adds up extremely well — it just doesn't currently have a home. He is not underutilized. He is underemployed, which is a different thing entirely — and a distinction this game happens to care about.
Every story art scene in SaltaVidas was AI-generated and placed by hand sliced out of AI-generated sprite sheets by a Python script that reads a lookup table, chops each sheet into a grid, and dumps the results into a folder — Lou's contribution was writing the lookup table and the lookup table was also written by an AI; Lou told the AI what scenes to generate and then told a different AI to correct this very sentence when it got too flattering, which is itself a form of quality assurance and arguably his most consistent contribution to this entire project. Every event narrative was AI-written and then reviewed, edited, rejected, or disputed by Lou — who has flown small aircraft, sailed, swung a hammer, held a CDL, played in a church choir, and has strong opinions about what basic training actually looks like versus how AI imagines it.
The AI does not know these things. It guesses. Sometimes brilliantly. Sometimes it puts a surfboard in a landlocked warehouse. Lou is the one who notices.
This is "AI-assisted, human-directed" in practice: the AI is extremely fast and never tired. Lou has taste, lived experience, and the ability to say "that's not how a CDL pre-trip inspection actually works, please redo it." This very About page has been rewritten, corrected, argued over, and revised more times than a government contract — by Lou and an AI that have strong and occasionally conflicting opinions about what "accurate" means when describing a real person's life. The AI keeps trying to be flattering. Lou keeps pushing back. You are currently reading draft seventeen, approximately.
The 250+ careers in SaltaVidas span a pretty wide spectrum of the economy:
The game doesn't take a position on any of this. It just quietly thinks it's worth the experience.
We want to add more. Seriously. If there's a career path you'd love to play through — wildlife biologist to park ranger to national park director; underwater welder; sommelier to winery owner; long-haul trucking to fleet owner (hint hint); rodeo clown to rodeo promoter to rodeo empire — we want to hear it.
Send it to us via the contact page and we'll add promising paths to the queue. The game is data-driven and genuinely expandable. Every suggestion gets read.
Submit a Career Idea →SaltaVidas is free to play — indefinitely, as far as anyone can tell. No account required to start. Register to save your progress and continue across devices.
The game runs on an Intel NUC Hades Canyon sitting in Louis's living room in Fedora, served to the internet via a Cloudflare tunnel because T-Mobile home internet doesn't do inbound ports. It's not exactly enterprise infrastructure. It's a passion project running on a game PC under a TV. We think that's charming.
Update: …and then Reddit came through with them clicks. 🎉 The little NUC under the TV started gasping for air on its T-Mobile uplink, so SaltaVidas now lives on Amazon Lightsail — actual cloud servers, with actual bandwidth, that don't slow down when someone fires up the Xbox. Less charming, way faster. Huge thanks to the Reddit community for the love and the traffic — you literally upgraded our infrastructure. 🙏
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