Remember to Pay Your Bells!

Crappy Home Designer is a short parody of the Animal Crossing series. The latter offers financial and commandeering privileges in the form of unlimited loan times, and controlling who lives where; magical powers earned through the game's initial real-world price tag, Crappy Home Designer aims to poke fun at these powers as a free game, where bills have to be paid, and control of the world is handled by a Narrator.

Crappy Home Designer was originally made for the month-long DAIR Residency, held by the Mackenzie Art Gallery  in August, 2020.  It was then revisited in February, 2021, and reduxxed over the spare time found in another month, into the game you see now!

Controls In-Game - This game requires a mouse and keyboard to play.

WASD - Movement ||| Mouse Movement - Look Around ||| C - Crouch ||| Spacebar - Jump ||| P - Pause ||| Left-Click - Grab Items ||| Right-Click - Freeze / Use Items ||| Mouse Wheel Click - Change Rotation Axis ||| Mouse Wheel Scroll - Rotate Grabbed Item

Dev Notes:

Dallas here. I had a fun time making Crappy Home Designer. I made the game with Unity, and had a ton of different things I wanted to learn how to do: How to have AI characters move around, how to create in-game sequences, how to have carriable items, and a bunch of other stuff. After having so much fun with Animal Crossing: New Horizons in April/June of 2020, it sort of became the game that was on my mind over the whole summer - it, and Persona 5 Royal.  ACNH was incredibly relaxing, and inspired me to go into my own backyard, and do some yard work. That was probably important too, because in Manitoba, snow leaves a lot to clean up after when it melts.  Anyways... like any other game dev, enamored by a high-quality triple AAA video game, I wanted to make a parody in my spare time. I was incredibly fortunate that I was able to take my first steps as part of the Mackenzie Art Gallery's DAIR residency - where I got to make, play, and talk about video games with other Canadian Artists. When it came to my own creation, Crappy Home Designer, my initial thought was, "what if T. Nook held you to paying off your loans quickly?" And, I sort of ran with that lol. Scoping out the project was interesting - if only because I didn't. I've developed stuff with Unity for around three years, through part-time projects and Game Jam games before - and I chose to try and do Crappy Home Designer because of the new batch of techniques and Unity tricks I'd be able to learn. I thought to just do as much as I could before we showed the games off! And, it was a pretty legit time for me! Though figuring out the poop flies was a buggy mess - t'was pretty crap. I think my most proud revelations were figuring out how to move Pogi and Yuk Yuk, and have them speak through this Letter-By-Letter reader I'd made from scratch, to get speech similar to AC. I spent some hours here and there typing stuff out just to hear the Narrator say whatever I wanted lol. Now, as I get close to wrapping the project, I think of how much furniture and tweaks to the grab functionality I'd like to add. Though, it's probably best if I move on to other games that have inspired me these past few years. :]