10 ways Animal Crossing could turn over it's next leaf

If you have been a fan of Nintendo since 2001 and owned a console or handheld of theirs, chances are you’ve heard of a game called Animal Crossing. Starting with its debut on the Gamecube (although originally for the N64, which was only released in Japan) the series has found itself among the ranks of Nintendo’s popular IP’s by having an iteration of itself released on nearly all of Nintendo’s systems since then.

In most versions of these games, sans the latest, you are a young boy (or girl) who has traveled to a strange town with humanoid animals to begin living on your own. If this sounds bizarre, it’s because it is, but it’s also strangely appealing and incredibly addictive. Even the creators themselves have a hard time explaining the addiction.

ah how the times have changed

That being said, there are some key elements to the game that can really get under my skin and make me wonder what the developer’s mindset was when they created these elements of the game. So I decided I would come up with a list of ten ways Animal Crossing could be improved for its next debut.

10. Home improvement

In the latest version of the game the player is capable of expanding their house by adding: A second floor, a basement, and three rooms  branching from the main room, each with the possibility of being enlarged twice.

Mi casa

You can also change many of the outside features such as the roofs color, the outside texture,( the fence, the door, the mailbox, and the ground texture it all sits on. Mind you all of these things are changed via Nook’s Homes which randomly changes its models of these items each day. This means in order to form your perfect outside look, you may have to wait a while. This may seem like a lot of options, but when you take into consideration the amount of items in this game that you can put in your house all that space starts to disappear. The Nintendo themed items themselves take up about 95% of one of my rooms and has become more of a closet then a show room.

On this episode of hoarders...

The simple solution is to be able to add more rooms. Its quite strange that at this point of the series you’re incapable of making the same three rooms that branch from the first one floor on the second or in the basement. Add three expansions to their size and you have more addictive debt to pay off and more space to put your stuff. Throw in some more outside customization options and you get a lot more room for creativity, literally.

9. Terrain Changing and Zone Restriction

For being the Mayor of the town, you actually have a limited say in what goes where. This includes: rocks, ramps leading to the beach, the town center, the town hall, and last, but not least, houses of new neighbors.

Many will argue that the randomness of these items give it a more realistic and interesting feel while playing the game, and while I agree it does create a less generic brand of experience, it also impedes on any design choices the player may have had for their town as houses can destroy gardens, trees, and any paths you laid down to make your town look nicer.

An easy fix would be to simply not allow house to be put on these things, or allow the player to restrict where house can be built. Another feature that would greatly improve a player’s ability to shape the town is a way to move rocks, make different branches of the river, add ramps to any of the cliffs, and maybe even change the height of the terrain to make hills and valleys.

8. A dedicated path system

Speaking of shaping your town, what better way to do that than to lay down some paths for our guest to follow and our neighbors to completely ignore? Aside from being aesthetically pleasing, paths have no other use. That being said, their use can really make your town look more like an actual town rather than a wooded area with homes.

Choose wisely

 Currently paths are merely designs from a select set of ten patterns that are place-able on the floor. The grass under the paths are still there and the path is easily removed by pressing B to scuff it away. The problem is you need more than one design for the path itself. Typically for a good path design you need about 8 designs for for edges, corners, and a middle piece. The fact that you only have 10 slots for design making the idea of having a path a big decision. If one of those patterns is changed it replaces whatever it was applied to with the new design. This means you can’t use a design and then swap out for another without
losing the original.

A dedicated path system were you could potentially store multiple kinds of paths and even just apply them to your current path would make paths much easier and a lot more worth it.

7. Streamline Works Projects

Newly added to the series are “Works Projects” which are structures (bridges, buildings), outdoor décor (floral arches, fountains), and other miscellaneous things (faceless cardboard cutouts, signs). In order to build these projects you must first be randomly told about one that you hopefully want to build by a villager. You then pick a spot in your town that is not too close to an edge, not too close to a rock, and not too close to a house. This is easier said then done because you have to speak to the secretary each time just to find out if its far away enough, what it will look like, or if the game is even placing it where you want it and you can’t rotate them to fit. If the spot is good, and you accept, a gyroid is placed there to collect money for it to be built, which will probably come from you mostly because the townspeople are typically cheapskates unable to pay for it. Once the funds are collected, it’s built at night and finished by the next day.

An easy solution to this would be an editor mode grid system that would let you plop them down similarly to the Sims. This would let you rotate the objects as well and the ability to placed objects closer to each other. Also instead of making the player fund the entire project all the time, why not let them hold fund-raisers or events to help raise money? As of right now the town barely reaches 5k in three weeks.

6. More Customization

Since Animal Crossing: Wild World, players have been able to design their own patterns and textures to display as a wallpaper, picture, floor pattern, cloths, and umbrellas. A forgotten feature of the first game of the series was the ability to display a design on your door.

Looks like Luigi got to pick the roof color.

This feature has since disappeared, and it makes me wonder why when I think it was a step in the right direction as well as the one they took from there on. Being able to customize the outside of your house was only made possible recently, but you are limited to the colors and textures of each component. What if I wanted a mixed colored tiled roof? What if I wanted my stone fence to be more gray? These are all things that the player should be able to control, and yet they cannot; the closest thing they had to it, disappeared after the first game.

This system could also apply to the works projects in the town to give them a more personal touch rather than being simply the same no matter which town it’s built in. Couple that with a slightly more robust paint mode and you’re going to see some even more amazing stuff from the people who have already done great things with the tools given to them.

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