Animal Crossing Director Reveals Plenty Of Details Regarding Happy Home Designer And Amiibo Festival

GamesBeat managed to catch up with Animal Crossing director Aya Kyogoku and talked at length about the forthcoming Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer for Nintendo 3DS and Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival for Wii U. Kyogoku explains why they decided to create two spin-off titles from the Animal Crossing universe as well as talking about where Nintendo see’s the series heading next. It’s an extensive interview, so it’s well worth reading the full write-up here.

GamesBeat: Why make an Animal Crossing that hones in on this one specific aspect of the game [series]?

Aya Kyogoku: In Animal Crossing, home creation and home decoration was an aspect of the game that a lot of people enjoyed. But that’s only one part of living out your life in Animal Crossing. When we were developing Animal Crossing, we had to come up with ideas for houses that the animals have when they first move in to your town. They have a set of furniture and decorations they use. That was very fun for us as developers. 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. That’s where the origins of this home-designing concept came from.

GamesBeat: Is there a budget with each house project that you have to work with, or can you go crazy and build a huge mansion for every animal?

Kyogoku: No, we got rid of the idea of a budget. Whether to include one or not was something that we thought hard about and discussed amongst the development team. What we wanted to get out of this game was for the player to reflect their creativity in the game. We didn’t want any constraints from budgeting to be an issue. In real life, depending on the budget you had, you might have to give up on some things you wanted to see. We didn’t want that to happen in the game world as well.

GamesBeat: Is that the Amiibo support? You use the Animal Crossing Amiibos, and those characters will show up in your homes?

Kyogoku: That’s one of the functions of Amiibo, to be able to invite animals and create this scene where you can take a picture of a birthday party or a concert that’s going on. That’s one big aspect of the Amiibo function. To be sure, Happy Home Designer can be played without any Amiibo cards. The animals will hang around in front of Nook’s Homes thinking, oh, I want a house like this. You’ll talk to them and take on their requests and build their houses. But with the cards, you can reach out to animals in particular. You’ll be making a call and saying, hey, would you be interested in building a house with us? For a lot of Animal Crossing fans, it’ll be great to be able to reach out to their favorite animal at will and come to build a house for them. That’s one feature. The second feature is, in the Animal Crossing series, there are two general types of animals. The ones that move into your town, they become residents, they become your neighbor, you develop a relationship with them. Then there are characters like Tom Nook or K.K. Slider who serve a special role in the game, but don’t necessarily live in your town. Using Amiibo cards you’re able to build a house for them as well, which is something new.

GamesBeat: It seems like with this game and Amiibo Festival on Wii U, Nintendo is branching out [with] the Animal Crossing crossing franchise. It used to be only one thing, but now we’re seeing all these new ideas. Is that a conscious move to expand Animal Crossing?

Kyogoku: This time around, there’s obviously this new thing called Amiibo. The development team for Animal Crossing, we just really wanted Animal Crossing Amiibos. We thought it would be cute. We thought fans would be happy. In the past, Animal Crossing has only been Animal Crossing, but we thought that with the addition of Amiibo — how could we make an Animal Crossing game that would be fun by adding Amiibo features? What resulted was Happy Home Designer on 3DS and Amiibo Festival on the Wii U. This was a way to try different ways of playing Animal Crossing. We kept thinking, this idea might be fun, that idea might be fun. Eventually we ended up with these two different games. Amiibos are really cool figures, but beyond that, the biggest difference is the way they’re linked with gameplay. It’s important that there’s a game to go along with Amiibo. We felt like Amiibo could benefit from an Animal Crossing twist and Animal Crossing could really benefit from Amiibo as well.