Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer
| Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer | |
|---|---|
Box art used for all territories
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| Developer(s) | Nintendo EAD |
| Publisher(s) | Nintendo |
| Director(s) | Isao Moro |
| Producer(s) | Hisashi Nogami Aya Kyogoku |
| Programmer(s) | Gentaro Takaki |
| Artist(s) | Akiko Hirono |
| Writer(s) | Makoto Wada Mitsuhiro Takano Kunio Watanabe |
| Composer(s) | Kazumi Totaka |
| Series | Animal Crossing |
| Platform(s) | Nintendo 3DS |
| Release date(s) | |
| Genre(s) | Sandbox game |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
| Aggregate score | |
|---|---|
| Aggregator | Score |
| Metacritic | 66/100 |
| Review scores | |
| Publication | Score |
| Game Informer | 5/10 |
| GameSpot | 5/10 |
| GamesRadar |   |
| IGN | 8/10 |
| Nintendo Life | 7/10 |
Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer is a sandbox video game developed and published by Nintendo, with assistance from Monolith Soft, for the Nintendo 3DS. The game was released in Japan in July 2015, in North America in September 2015, and in PAL regions in October 2015. The game is a spin-off of the Animal Crossing series where the player has to design homes for various anthropomorphic animal characters. The game received mixed reviews from critics upon release.
Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer downplays the wider community simulation mechanics of the main Animal Crossing series in favor of focusing on house designing; players work as an employee of Nook's Homes, designing homes for other animal villagers based around their suggestions. As players progress, they will unlock additional furniture elements they can incorporate into their designs. Players can also visit the homes they have created.
The game integrates with Animal Crossing Amiibo cards; scanning cards allows their respective character to visit a home that a player had designed, and allows players to design homes for other major characters such as K.K. Slider and Tom Nook.
Animal Crossing series producer Aya Kyogoku explained that Happy Home Designer was inspired by the internal process of designing homes for the animal villagers in the main Animal Crossing games, stating that "We had to think about, what kind of things would this animal like? What kind of life do they lead? Trying to figure out what they'd want was very fun, and we tried to think of a way we could get this kind of experience to players as well." Players are not tied to a specific budget when designing homes; while the concept was considered, the development team believed that such a limit placed too much of a burden on the player's creativity.
amiibo were also an influence on Happy Home Designer and a sister game, Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival, as the development team thought that Animal Crossing amiibo would be "cute", and brainstormed new gameplay concepts for the franchise that incorporated them. The two games also have integration with each other; houses designed in Happy Home Designer can appear in-game within amiibo Festival. Eight series character amiibo were planned for release with amiibo Festival. Upon their announcement, some expressed concerns with the series moving in a different gameplay direction; however Kyogoku noted that it and amiibo Festival were spin-offs, and don't necessarily represent where the mainline series would go in the future.
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