Animal Crossing - New Horizons

Here's to writing my first game review, starting from Animal Crossing. I purchased this game on my switch last month, and have been motivated enough to play this everyday. This isn't exactly a player review, but a short piece on how tiny systemic elements make a game lively and relatable. This is also inspired from my thesis that I wrote on Systemic Design during my Masters.

In-game screenshot

EXPERIMENTATION - CROSS BREEDING FLOWERS

Animal Crossing - New Horizons has a quite a lot of interesting things to do and discover, which helps keep the game fresh. One of the things I noticed was the space of experimentation that the game provides. A few days ago, I read an article that helped provide tips for how to spawn different types of bugs on your island. There is this new kind of butterfly that apparently spawns when you "cross-breed" flowers, and this came to me as an eye opener.

I quickly decided to experiment this, but didn't quite realize that this was already happening in my flower field, where all my flowers were dumped. The picture below shows the special brown flower that had spawned in between. I was quite surprised, since I accidentally left a space in between.

Accidentally spawned a brown flower

I decided to experiment this in a different space to understand how this happens, and I finally got the pattern (by also doing some further reading).

A pink flower spawns

This very simple mechanic, the space to let players experiment with something so natural, got me inspired as a designer.

I'm still waiting for the new kind of butterfly to spawn, and will definitely update this written piece as I slowly progress through the game. But for now, let us all try get inspired by tiny realistic elements that are added by designers around us!

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