Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer (Dōbutsu no Mori: Happī Hōmu Dezainā どうぶつの森：ハッピーホームデザイナー lit. "Animal Forest: Happy Home Designer") is a community simulation video game developed and published by Nintendo, released on July 30, 2015, for Nintendo 3DS in Japan and on September 25, 2015 in North America and Europe on October 2, 2015. The game is a spin-off of the Animal Crossing series where the player has to design homes for various anthropomorphic animal characters.
Show off your style by designing homes for all of your favorite Animal Crossing villagers! Use your creativity to design the perfect houses - inside and out - for both old and new friends. With the new amiibo cards, you can call your favorite villagers into the game.
Features:---Design the interior and exterior of hundreds of homes for animal villagers
---Leave your decorative touch on the school, hospital and other public facilities
---Collect and Connect - Collect and share amiibo cards of your favorite villagers, and invite them into your game
---Tap amiibo cards to invite up to four characters into a room to hang out
---Tap the amiibo cards of special characters to call in animals that would otherwise not appear in your game with requests
Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer - GameplayAnimal Crossing: Happy Home Designer downplays the wider life 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 Amiibo cards; players can unlock the ability to design houses for other major characters such as K.K. Slider and Tom Nook, and can also invite their respective character to visit a home that a player has designed.
Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer - DevelopmentAnimal Crossing series director 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 will 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.
Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer - SalesDuring the game's debut week in Japan, it was the best selling video game in the region, with 522,556 copies sold. As of September 2015, total Japanese sales have surpassed 1 million copies.
Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer - ReceptionThe game received mixed to average reviews. IGN's Kallie Plagge praised the game for its "freedom to be creative", but noted that the game sometimes felt unrewarding. Similarly, Nintendo Life felt that the "sheer volume of content was staggering", but was critical of the "lack of any real challenge".
Game Informer's Jeff Cork gave the game a 5 out of 10, saying that it is "a deep dive into Animal Crossing’s ordinarily shallow home-design pool, without the town elements that make the series such a success".
