No Place Like Home

Home Space was a collapse puzzle game in development which saw users beating levels to progress and unlock new rooms in a large, 3D house. Each room was fully customizable and new items such as furniture, decorations and wall & floor textures were acquired by completing room chapters. Players were given access to an extremely immersive room editing tool which allowed for endless combinations of style and aesthetic making each players’ house both unique and personal.

In Home Space, the meta game allowed users to customize rooms in their house however they saw fit. We wanted to limit the customization restrictions as much as possible but in a 3D space, moving furniture and decorations around did require a lot of thought; especially because we allowed item rotation in addition to movement. I was put in charge of designing the customization grid and interaction experience for users.

I started this process with a set of rules for how players engage with the space and interact with items (not all process rules pictured). From there, I took an updated rendering of the 3D space and applied the grid to what we knew would be our rooms. After some optimization, the last step was to render and implement the fully designed experience.

One extremely important part of my visual design process is creating prototypes that walk members of the team through UI and UX design decisions I’m considering. These prototypes get handed off to technical, VFX artists and engineers for polish and implementation. I begin making prototypes as soon as possible, even if that means using simple greyscale, geometric shapes to help solve a fundamental interaction or figure out the user experience for a core flow.

Here is a small sampling of some early development, WIP prototypes that were essential to figuring out the game design, UI/UX design and overall product design in Home Space.

Furniture placement test with grid activation and movement snapping.

Furniture storage drawer test for removing items from the scene.

Character narrative test with user driven response choices.

Early concept test for launching and navigating the in-game furniture store.

Credits

Game Director
Kris Horowitz

Game Design
Kris Horowitz

Engineering
Eddie Cameron, Thomas Wolfe

Visual & UX Design
Austin Roesberg

Illustration
Ray Bruwelheide

3D & Technical Art
Ashley Farlow

Composer/Sound Design
Ross Wariner, Cody Uhler

QA
Johnny McNair