A couple years ago we did a couple town tours for Animal Crossing: new Leaf, checking out some of the more infamous creepy towns via Dream Suite.
This year Nintendo decided we needed a little more crack cocaine for home design, and rolled out Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer, where you take on the job of designing not only new facilities (shops, department store, concert hall, school, even a hotel and hospital), but design other villagers' homes with specific ideas or themes.
No really. If you've ever wanted to design Isabelle's dream home, now's your chance.
This is somewhere between a sequel and a sister game for New Leaf. Its using pretty much the same assets as its sister game, but HHD goes above and beyond in the design department, adds in exterior design, even subdivides space placement for items to occupy half-spaces. If you have no idea why this matters, you obviously have never played an Animal Crossing game in your life. Remedy that immediately.
While you don't get to use these new mechanics to design your own dream home (that's pretty much your job in NL), you can design multilevel dream homes and establishments where only the item limit (pretty high but I've actually hit it a few times >>) and your imagination are your limits. Since the game doesn't run in realtime, you can easily spend hours designing homes, into the wee hours, with a mutter of "just one more home".
The home design hole. Its gorgeous.
But I'm not here to review the game (buyitbuyitbuyitBUYIT), but to show off a few examples of (what else) creepy facilities I've come across. Believe me. I have so many more but I have a party to get to and once you start looking at uploaded houses on the online network, you pretty much forget to eat.
I've got 2 facilities (one school and one hospital) that can whet your teeth on the creepy home design front. Sadly one, the hospital, appears to no longer be up, but I'll include its code still in case it does return.
Mei's Hospital
Not to be confused as C&C's Mei, this designer is from japan and has a few rooms I'll showcase. Animals occupying the facilities will come in sometimes wearing clothing unique to them, like waitress outfits and cafe shirts in restaurants or PJs and nurse's uniforms in hospitals, and will perform sometimes new actions and emotions depending on what they're interacting with. HHD really shines in these new additions of emotions (like bowing apology, or Lottie's super cute pose), and some items have different interactions than in NL--bookshelves will let you read, and interacting with a food item produces eating utensils.
In this screen, the waiting room is relatively normal, though the ominous welcome mat says otherwise. One of the rooms is a doctor's exam room, where you'll see a doctor and nurse check a sick patient. One of the other new mechanics is the ability to change these "occupations" by picking them up and moving them, or even moving a character by picking them up. This is useful when you've made rooms or encounter rooms where its impossible to navigate the items. Each facility or character usually comes with unique items you can use for the themes, which are entered into your inventory. Even clothing can be entered, which can be worn later when you revisit the facility. You can't wear any other top except the HH uniform when designing, but off-hours, you can change into the many clothing items you'll accumulate.
Here's the patient's room to the hospital, which is suitably creepy with tombstones and flowers and lab bench beds. A couple skeletons decorate the place.
You can talk to some characters when sleeping, and get some amusing replies.
What a nice place! XD Its a pretty good spooky hospital. While it isn't still up, here's the code to see if it might pop up later: 0108-7739-891
Kana's School
Kana's school really drew me in from its initial pic, which had a partitioned room littered with red scrawls on jet black surfaces. These pics are usually taken during the overview after finishing a home or facility, or even taken when visiting later. Some, to create mystery, don't show you everything, and some may even be blank black pictures to entice you to visit.
This school looked promising, so I checked it out. It was divided into 2 portions: one ominous and doomtastic, and the other cutsey
and bubbly.
Well, guess which I visited first?
HA. Try again.
The right side is decorated with shelves and cute items and food. So I assumed perhaps the sweet side might be a cafeteria. I was pretty much right.
What's nice about the new system in HHD is the ability to quickly see refurbish-able items right away, instead of waiting 30 mins like in NL. Some items have the same refurbishing looks, others have a few new ones, and still other new items have new looks too.
This looks to be the sweet cafeteria, as aforementioned. Students are seated at pretty seats with tasty food on the tables, and partitioned rows of different foods to select from.
One of my favorite things to do in this game is partition and divide spaces into smaller spaces, and I learned a lot of different spacing options from looking at japanese uploaded places. Sometimes it pays to stake a long time looking at other options to add to your home designs.
I mean look at this place! @_@ I wanna eat there.
Notice the food items in the dead center of a 2 space table. This is an example of the subspace placement that's available in HHD. It almost makes me wish it was available in NL. Also the ability to pick up yourself and place them where you want can make for flush table to chair placement, like here, because otherwise you won't be able to get in.
Let's take a look at the other side of the school.
Whelp. That looks promising. >_>
Part of the new movement animations in this game is tied to the fact that one can place items on half-spaces. If a half-space is open between objects, your character will scoot past them sideways, much like one may do when sliding through a narrow space so you don't knock something over. Its a cute animation and necessary for the new placement scale. Otherwise things would get tricky in navigating.
Animals can't do this movement, but the ability to pick them up to put them where you want like chess pieces helps with that.
Here's a lab table. There are a few littered about in the room, with stools and chairs. I made sure to seat everyone so i could walk around these narrow spaces.
Here's another look at a corner. Its hard to read the red scrawls on the walls and partitions. Patterns like these, like in NL, can be copied to your own inventory later if they're in the possession of the original creator. If they're from somewhere else, you'll have to find out the original source to get them. Still, pintrest and tumblr are full of QR codes for new patterns for clothes or tiles, so don't forget to try to look.
Don't forget to make use of the 360 camera angles, which can close in pretty close, to even panning out far to get a big view of the room. Sometimes you discover interesting things.
Here's Mari falling asleep. That's hardcore.
I had a little lamb. BUT I ATE IT.
I have a feeling maybe only 2 readers will get that reference and I feel old.
Kana's got a lot of really well made homes, and not just creepy. Be sure to fav her so you can check out some truly inspired designs. Here's the code for this school but check out her other works: 0304-7731-806.
Hopefully that gets you out and about this weekend for home design!
--Dio (10/30/31)