This cozy city builder is full of adorable gourds people because a rocket scientist quit her job.

The chill building games are enjoying a bit of popularity right now, and cozy game lovers are eating well. I'm glad I didn't miss out on Gourdlets, the adorable pastel city-builder. You can decorate the interior of the buildings. I'm stuck with this game for ever. It's much more detailed than the demo I played last year. This makes sense, now that I know it was made by a rocket scientist who quit her job.

Gourdlets, like other cozy building games that have become popular in recent years, is not a game where you can win or loose. When I first loaded it, the tutorial said that you don't have any money because "we tried to explain capitalism to the gourdlets, but it made them too tired." The same, little gourds. You can use a variety of terrains, decorations, trees, houses and more to create an island for your gourd people in any size or shape.

Gourdlets is the answer to what so many players asked for when they played Townscaper or Tiny Glade: cute characters that live inside your creations. Gourdlets has super cute citizens that react to your creations, unlike Tiny Glade's buildings. Your Gourdlets can interact with the things that you build, such as fishing on docks, working in farms, or riding on a large Ferris Wheel. It's more than a diorama, Gourdlets grow and mature as they interact with the things you build. You can spend more time managing their life than I expected.

Gourdlets gain experience as they mature. You can use this to call the "parcel-train" that will deliver new furniture items you haven't unlocked yet in the catalogue. The Town Ledger allows you to name your Gourdlets and follow them around. You can also choose their outfits. You can choose which Gourdlets will be allowed into a house. You can also set the background music, ambient sounds and a dresscode. Yes, there is a dresscode. You could, for example, create a cute restaurant and tell Gourdlets to wear a party hat whenever they arrive.

Gourdlets, like many other popular cozy games, was created by a largely solo developer. Preethi Vaidyanathan, a former aerospace engineer, quit her job in order to focus on her side project of game development under the name AuntyGames. Vaidyanathan told PC Gamer she realized she wanted to make game development a career after she started waking up 2 hours earlier than normal to watch Godot tutorials. "I've worked on side projects in the past, but none that would cause me to lose sleep," she says.

When I hear "rocket engineers turned game developers", I expect them to work on some highly detailed simulation, like Kerbal Space Programme or Oxygen not Included or something.

Vaidyanathan says, "I don't play strategy games that are deep." "When I need to relax, I play nostalgic games like The Sims 2 or I fish in Stardew Valley for hours until my mind is empty. Sometimes I want work on complex engineering problems and sometimes I just want to lie down and not think. I knew that making a game would be a difficult and challenging project. I wanted to play it as mindless fun."

Gourdlets are adorable, but I wouldn't call them mindless. It gives me goals to work towards. Even I, a lover of building games can feel aimless when playing something as open-ended and free-form as Townscaper. Gourdlets parcel train and growing catalogue of unlockable items gives me just enough structure to keep playing for * check watch* many evenings.

Gourdlets was launched last week. When I asked Vaidyanathan how it went, she replied: "My annoying but technically correct answer is that it depends on the rocket and the game."

Fair enough. Gourdlets is available on Steam for only $5, which in my opinion is a huge plus.