Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer

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Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer (どうぶつの森 ハッピーホームデザイナー, Dōbutsu no Mori: Happī Hōmu Dezainā "Animal Forest: Happy Home Designer") is a Nintendo 3DS simulation game developed by Nintendo. It was announced during a Nintendo Direct broadcast on April, 2015 , and was released in Japan on July , 2015. It was released in North America on September, 2015 and Europe on October , 2015. .

The game is a spin-off to the main and does not feature the usual staples of Animal Crossing games, such as fishing or bug catching. Instead, the options for designing houses are vastly expanded, with outdoor furniture in particular having been vastly expanded upon from 's public works projects.

Gameplay
In Happy Home Designer, the player is given a job at Nook's Homes, and will be tasked with designing houses for villagers, who visit the plaza of New Town, who will each request a specific theme. The player then selects a plot of land for the new house to go, and then can design the interior with furniture, carpet, and wallpaper. The game introduces a new special character, Lottie, who assists the player with their job. The catalog is dramatically expanded, with items grouped into specific themes for ease of navigation. The touch screen on the Nintendo 3DS is used as a floor planner to move items around a room with precision.

As the player completes more requests set by villagers, more furniture options will become available. In addition, the player can customize other buildings in the town, such as the bridge, as well as build new projects like the school, which makes its debut in. Furthermore, new villagers are introduced in Happy Home Designer, including Filly (Number 7) and Felyne, collaborations with the 7-Eleven chain of convenience stores, and the Monster Hunter series, respectively.

Despite many staple features of the being missing, character customization remains in Happy Home Designer with some differences from New Leaf and other previous entries. The player can select their skin tone during character creation; tanning is no longer the only way to achieve darker skin tones. As of now, features to the player can be adjusted through the upstairs floor of Nook's Homes.

Houses designed by the player in Happy Home Designer can be transferred to another upcoming spin-off,, where they will be displayed in the background of mini-games and the overworld. The town environment has also been improved in Happy Home Designer, featuring much more varied landscapes and layouts.

Customization
The player can freely customize their character's appearance at the start of the game. This includes face, hair style and color, eye color and skin tone.

In addition to the initial customization, the player is able to edit their character's appearance later in the game as well. In order to do so, the player first needs to unlock the Styling Machine on the second floor of Nook's Homes. This can be achieved through purchasing and completing the Styling Machine course lesson in the Happy Home Handbook.

Unlocking the Styling Machine also gives access to opposite gender hairstyles.

The player can use the changing room on the second floor of Nook's Homes to change their clothes. The player is required to wear their Happy Home Academy uniform while working, but are allowed to equip and change their bottoms, hats, accessories, shoes and socks. The player can unlock clothing after designing for the villager/special person,like for example the player can unlock trianguler shades after helping K.K Slider.

Clothing and accessories are unlocked throughout the game, similar to furniture. Completing a home will award the player with different clothing items, matching the personality or request of the commissioning character.

Amiibo Integration
Happy Home Designer, as well as being the first game compatible with amiibo, introduces card amiibo for the first time. These come bundled in small packs and are cheaper than model amiibo. They can be used to unlock design requests from the villagers depicted on the cards, and they also can be used to view rooms that the player has designed for them.

Series one amiibo cards consists of 100 cards, the first 17 are Special characters, and the rest are normal villagers, it has been released in Japan and will launch in other regions along side the game. Series two amiibo cards has been announced for release in mid October for Japan, it will consist of another 100 cards with the first 17 (101-117) of Special characters and the rest are normal villagers, the same as before. You can see who does and who doesn't have amiibo cards at the bottom of each villager's page.

Players can use amiibo on their New Nintendo 3DS systems, because it has an in-built NFC reader, which is necessary to use amiibo. Nintendo 3DS and 2DS users can buy the NFC reader peripheral, which was released on the same day as Happy Home Designer.

It has been stated that the Villager amiibo from the Super Smash Bros. series can be scanned for a bonus item.

The amiibo Festival amiibo work the same as the cards (for example, using Resetti's amiibo will work the same as using his card.)

The amiibo phone is a device invented by Lyle found in Nook's Homes. The player can use it with the amiibo cards to make phone calls to villagers and request to remodel their house. In addition to designing the room for the villager depicted on the card, the player can scan the cards to invite them over to other villagers' houses. Characters acquired from amiibo cards can also be assigned to work in the facilities of New Town. This doesn't apply to special characters.

Some special characters who are known have family members will invite their family members in their home by default regardless of the characters being seperate cards. Examples would be the Kappa Family as well as the Resetti Brothers.

Development
Happy Home Designer was produced by Aya Kyogoku and Hisashi Nogami, with direction credits by Isao Moro, and is the first title to have a female producer. It is also the first time that Katsuya Eguchi, producer of, , and , and director on all other previous titles, has not played a lead role in development, possibly because Happy Home Designer is not a 'main'  game. Co-producer Hisashi Nogami, who has served as director for nearly every title to date, makes his return to the series after his absence during  's development period (during which time he was producing Splatoon for the Wii U).

The first mention of Happy Home Designer's development came in March 2014, Katsuya Eguchi stated that the next game in the, would need to fully integrate new features of a hypothetical new console in order to to "create a new way of playing Animal Crossing". Producer Aya Kyogoku stated that amiibo were instrumental in the creation of Happy Home Designer, stating that the title was created in order to create a line of Animal Crossing amiibo. "Honestly, we just wanted Animal Crossing amiibo. We wanted the company to make Animal Crossing amiibo, so that's why we made a game that works with them."

Happy Home Designer sprung out of the development team thinking about interior design in New Leaf and other previous entries in the series. It was decided to make a game based around interior design after the development team wanted to share the lives of villagers with the player. The developers had considered adding a budget limit to the game, but it was decided that it was a better decision to not impose any external limitations on the player's design choices.

Reception
Happy Home Designer sold 523,000 units in Japan during its first four days of release. Happy Home Designer topped the weekly charts again in its second week of sale, selling a further 181,377 units. Its lifetime total currently stands at 844,167 copies sold in Japan.

Happy Home Designer received mixed reviews from critics, and has a score of 67% on Metacritic. Many reviewers praised the customization options, but criticized the lack of challenge, or felt the game was unrewarding.