Animal Crossing Wiki
Register
Advertisement
Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer Gallery

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 1st, 2015[1], and was released in Japan on July 30th, 2015. It was released in North America on September 25th, 2015 and Europe on October 2nd, 2015. It was released in Australia on October 3rd, 2015. A South Korean release was planned, but it was cancelled.

The game is a spin-off to the main Animal Crossing series and doesn't feature the usual staples of Animal Crossing games, such as fishing or bug catching. Instead, the options for designing houses have been greatly increased, with outdoor furniture in particular having been expanded upon from New Leaf's public works projects.

Happy Home Designer can be played offline or online. It has some online features that the player can take advantage of, such as sharing the homes they designed. However, Nintendo made an announcement that internet services for the 3DS and Wii U will be discontinued on early April 2024, ending official services for some features in Happy Home Designer.

Gameplay[]

In Happy Home Designer, the player is given a job at Nook's Homes[2] 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. If the player is making a house or building of any type and does not have the requested items, the house or building will not be accepted.

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 Happy Home Designer[citation needed]. 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.[3]

HHD screenshot 4

The player decides where to place a building

Despite many staple features of the Animal Crossing series being missing, character customization remains in Happy Home Designer with some differences from New Leaf and other previous entries. The player can now 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 Animal Crossing series spin-off, amiibo Festival, where they are displayed in the background of mini-games and the overworld.[4] 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 triangular 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 Animal Crossing series 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.

Amiibo card collection

A set of amiibo cards

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, and 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. The player 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 a built-in 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.[5]

The Villager amiibo from the Super Smash Bros. series can be scanned for a bonus item. If one goes to talk to Lottie directly after getting this item, she will act surprised and ask how such a rare item was obtained, and then ask if she could have it. If the player says yes, she will act extremely grateful. When she first greets the player in the morning the next day, she will say that Tom Nook said the player could have the day off. Strangely enough, home design requests can still be done on that day.

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.[6] 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 to have family members will invite their family members in their home by default regardless of the characters being separate 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 Animal Crossing series title to have a female producer. It is also the first time that Katsuya Egsisterly, producer of Wild World, City Folk, and New Leaf, and director on all other previous Animal Crossing series titles, has not played a lead role in development, possibly because Happy Home Designer is not a 'main' Animal Crossing series game. Co-producer Hisashi Nogami, who has served as director for nearly every Animal Crossing series title to date, makes his return to the series after his absence during New Leaf's development period (during which time he was producing Splatoon for the Wii U).

Nfc-reader-720x404

The NFC reader peripheral

The first mention of Happy Home Designer's development came in March 2014, Katsuya Eguchi stated that the next game in the Animal Crossing series, would need to fully integrate new features of a hypothetical new console in order to to "create a new way of playing Animal Crossing".[7] Producer Aya Kyogoku stated that amiibo was 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."[8]

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.[9] 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.[9]

Reception[]

HHD screenshot 2

Lottie tells the player a villager's request.

Happy Home Designer sold 523,000 units in Japan during its first four days of release.[citation needed] 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.[10]

Happy Home Designer received mixed reviews from critics, and has a score of 67% on Metacritic.[11] Many reviewers praised the customization options, but criticized the lack of challenge, or felt the game was unrewarding.

Trivia[]

  • There is information in the code of the game for unused villagers such as Ursala. All of these unused villagers eventually appeared in New Leaf's Welcome amiibo update.
  • Some OSTs from Happy Home Designer were reused in Welcome amiibo.

References[]

Advertisement