New ACNH dev interview

[McRibbie]

Animal Crossing: New Horizons dev on how the furniture was made

Nintendo developer Ami Takai opens up on how the furniture was created for Animal Crossing: New Horizons and making it look good in HD.

nintendoeverything.com

This got posted a few days ago, and a couple of AC YouTubers made videos on it, but I haven’t seen it here yet so I thought I’d post it!

The original interview was on Nintendo’s recruitment website, but it’s been translated into English by Nintendo Everything, and it’s with ACNH’s lead furniture designer Ami Takai, about the creation of the furniture within the game and the struggles and challenges the team faced.

Enjoy!

 

[RollingAntony]

Something very similar regarding the furniture was explained back on 2020, but it's cool to see more info on the behind-the-scenes.

This is one of my fave parts from the article:

In Animal Crossing the important point is ensuring the ‘personality’ of each piece while still fitting into the game world and maintaining a coherence in the overall design

It's spot on and the results are masterfully shown on the game. The game offers the biggest amount of furniture items ever, even more if you include the custom options and I love that so much care and patience was poured into their creation. It's sad that this effort hasn't been appreciated by the fandom, and I hope the team doesn't lose the spirit and will to work as hard as they did.

 

[-Mars-]

Wow this is so wonderful, I love all the furniture we got in New Horizons, scrolling through my catalog and looking through it all really makes me think there's something for everyone in this game
it makes me so happy to see Nintendo put a lot of pride and effort into making all these pieces and making sure fans would enjoy them

 

[VanitasFan26]

Thats amazing how much time and effort they put into those furniture items. Now I understand why it took so long for the 2.0 update to come out. They were working on so many new furniture items. I am grateful for them actually doing that.

 

[Millysaurusrexjr]

Creating high resolution furniture takes a lot of time and effort, and we coordinated our efforts with more people than ever before in the series’ history, including a contract company to help with modeling.

More people than ever + a contract company working on furniture and yet so much furniture missing! I am NOT complaining though, obviously it took a lot of time to make the furniture we have in HD! It'd be cool if they came out with a book detailing the process and showing the concepts for furniture

 

[RollingAntony]

Creating high resolution furniture takes a lot of time and effort, and we coordinated our efforts with more people than ever before in the series’ history, including a contract company to help with modeling.

More people than ever + a contract company working on furniture and yet so much furniture missing! I am NOT complaining though, obviously it took a lot of time to make the furniture we have in HD! It'd be cool if they came out with a book detailing the process and showing the concepts for furniture

While we will never be sure unless they outright state it, it's pretty clear the decision to not include certain furniture from previous games (not missing per se) is a conscious decision by the developers. With NH having around 160 furniture items more than the previous record holder, it's not about the devs somehow missing some pieces, it's about them wanting to move on a different direction without the shackles of old and boring traditions.

I applaud the creativity and the death of 90% of the dull cookie cutter furniture sets that plagued the series. I really hope those things stay dead and the devs keep reinventing themselves.

 

[QueenCobra]

Oh man, this sounds fun! I hope she spills the tea on the legendary froggy chair. I wish you could talk to it, but I also don’t want to feel like Clint Eastwood.

 

[Introspective Onlooker]

While I do miss some of the old furniture sets, I can't deny that this is a commendable achievement — to be able design these new furniture sets and fit them into HD with full rotations. I think people find it hard to appreciate this aspect of the game because it's hard to get used ti something brand new, and it means they have to reassess their thought processes when it comes to customizing their homes. This probably extends to villagers as well; lots of people associated villagers by their choice of furniture, as some villagers kept sporting these styles for their homes across the series until NH came along.

 

[StarlitGlitch]

Interesting article! While I do wish some more fun furniture pieces from past games could have been worked into NH I do appreciate how well the new pieces look graphically.

 

[Brookie]

This is amazing! Tbh I could only really appreciate the furniture after 2.0 came out. It all seemed so basic before It was still good though!

 

[NicksFixed]

I'm so glad you posted this. For so long I've been a bit irritated by people thinking you can just copy and paste assets from other games and systems onto others and they will somehow magically work. People say "How easy would it be to just put Pocket Camp items into NH." It's not that easy !! Look at the concept art for the Retro Fan and you'll see just how much work goes into just the designing of a single object in the first place.

Regardless of your opinion on the number of items or how they look, the item designers deserve far more credit than they're given for the amazing job they did with this game ...

 

[cocoacat]

I'm one of those people that misses some of the old furniture, but there's no denying that the furniture in game is beautiful and well designed. A+ graphics, imo.

I wish they had left the door open to add more dlc to Animal Crossing. There's still plenty of things that could be added and I'd happily pay for it.

 

[McRibbie]

I'm bumping this thread I made the best part of a year ago because there's also some other NH-related articles on Nintendo's recruitment site that haven't been covered.

They're untranslated, so you're probably going to have to use Google Translate to read them and the translation won't be 100% perfect, but they're worth reading if you're interested in game dev:

The museum:

仕事を読み解くキーワード：実際に見て、感じて、みんなで作る｜採用情報｜任天堂

任天堂の現場ではたらく社員の声をご紹介する「仕事を読み解くキーワード」。キーワード「実際に見て、感じて、みんなで作る」の記事です。

www.nintendo.co.jp

Nook Miles:

仕事を読み解くキーワード：自由な遊び場に道しるべを｜採用情報｜任天堂

任天堂の現場ではたらく社員の声をご紹介する「仕事を読み解くキーワード」。キーワード「自由な遊び場に道しるべを」の記事です。

www.nintendo.co.jp

Composing the main theme:

仕事を読み解くキーワード：任天堂の曲づくりで大切なこと｜採用情報｜任天堂

任天堂の現場ではたらく社員の声をご紹介する「仕事を読み解くキーワード」。キーワード「任天堂の曲づくりで大切なこと」の記事です。

www.nintendo.co.jp

Localisation:

仕事を読み解くキーワード：文化に合わせた翻訳を生み出すために｜採用情報｜任天堂

任天堂の現場ではたらく社員の声をご紹介する「仕事を読み解くキーワード」。キーワード「文化に合わせた翻訳を生み出すために」の記事です。

www.nintendo.co.jp

I'm also gonna throw in the 2nd half of the NH CEDEC talk from 2020. The first half was translated on Twitter by PushDustIn, but as far as I know the second half wasn't... but it probably should have been, because it's an insight on how the series has evolved:

『どうぶつの森』がインターネットを介さないオンラインゲームとして開発が始まり、『あつ森』に至るまで。シリーズの歴史と変遷を開発者たちが語る【CEDEC 2020】 | ゲーム・エンタメ最新情報のファミ通.com

CEDEC 2020にておこなわれたカンファレンス“『あつまれ　どうぶつの森』～シリーズにおける伝統と革新の両立を目指すゲームデザイン～”をリポート。

www.famitsu.com

Enjoy!

 

[McRibbie]

I've found another dev interview from Monolith Soft (the developers of the Xenoblade series and support studio for Animal Crossing, Splatoon, Zelda and Pikmin) about their work on NH:

京都スタジオ大幅増員につきデザイナー大募集 | INTERVIEW | モノリスソフト

京都スタジオの採用情報やスタッフインタビューをご紹介

www.monolithsoft.co.jp