Animal Crossing

I bought Animal Crossing New Horizons(‘Animal Crossing^TM: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch^TM System – Official Site’ 2025) for my switch in hopes that it would help me with the research of my game. 

I learnt that some of the mechanics in the game could really help me with the development of my game, 

1. Real-time day and night cycle makes the game feel like less of a rush, and has a lot of other implications in terms of how the player feels the game.
2. Different insects and fish appear at different times of the year, which made me think about seasons. If the player is a god, will they perceive seasons the same way as mortals? Doesn’t time pass faster as you age? Wouldn’t it be better if the season changed every time the player meditated? Would the change in scenery encourage the player to meditate more?
3. Often, what encourages the player to keep playing, atleast in the beginning, is that the user is given random furniture or objects as they keep playing, reinforcing a sense of discovery.
4. I was also going through a bunch of moral dilemmas because of the news about Trump having an argument on live tv with Zelensky. It made me think a lot about Van Neistat’s video about this book called “The Fourth Turning”(‘(68) We Are In A “FOURTH TURNING,” What Does That Mean? – YouTube’ 2025). This made me think about generationally, if there could be a system that somehow depicted the loop of going from creativity to conflict. Although this was never implemented due to the scope of the project.

Further Development

Over the next few days, I made multiple iterations of the game, each one improving upon the last.

This involved a lot of bug fixes that came with switching to Mac and PC, making new art assets, joining all the test scenes together to make a coherent scene, and fixing all the different bugs that came along the way.

I do want to mention that though the development process I learnt about all the things I could personally improve on,

1. Using third-party assets from the store instead of doing everything myself would make the overall process much faster, efficient and maybe even bug-free.
2. Learning visual scripting would help alot
3. Learning how to make UI rather than just learning figma, and also researching about typography and using gestalt principles would go a long way.

Playtesting Feedback

I play tested my game with 2 players:

Player A: She doesn’t play a lot of games, but has a background in arts. Her favourite game is club penguin.

• Complained that it was a bit difficult to understand, especially the controls. 
• Kept falling off the map
• Ran into bugs that had simple fixes
• Abstract rafting system didn’t work as intended

• Said that the meditation track worked well, provided small tweaks
• Explored the architecture and found it interesting

Player B: Plays a lot of games, makes YouTube videos, his favourite game is Minecraft and Elden Ring. Gave lots of useful input but have reduced it down to these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w_3kk53rVI

• Fell of the map
• Abstract crafting system didn’t work as intended, kept trying to draw because of the initial drawing systems, and how the crafting table had a paper and a quill.
• Abstract crafting system didn’t allow for uploading images
• Found some collider problems
• Wanted to be able to skip through the meditation, as an option.
• Kept restarting the game, complained about not having an escape button

• Had a hard time following the illusion and reality concept, but still vaguely understood it, describing it as ‘enlightenment’ and 
• Felt good after the meditation
• Liked the tree mechanic

Changes Made:

• Added instructions page
• Scaled and manipulated terrain
• Fixed minor bugs

I tried to improve upon as much as I could, but due to time constraints and scope, I wasn’t able to fix many of the larger bugs.