Squeakross: HSH – Designing Furniture – PART 1

First Blog Post of my website! And hopefully the start of many more 🐁

For a while I wanted to talk about how I created stuff for our games, I'm going to start with Squeakross because it's more fresh in my memory.

First of all, Squeakross: Home Squeak Home is a puzzle game with housing elements: when you solve a nonogram puzzle you win a furniture you can place in your home! Having each puzzle giving you a reward is a good way to keep players engaged with the gameplay but also adds a lot of modeling/texturing work. I'm going to go over my work process for the game!

🏡Studying Animal Crossing

As an Animal Crossing fan, first thing I did was to study what their themed furniture sets contained.

I realized they all had some kind of common furniture like bed, chairs, tables, deemed necessary to make a living room and bedroom at least.

After looking at many series, I made a list of mandatory furniture for each sets and a few slots for additional furniture that are set specific. I then came up with a list that looked like this:

Having this list helped me nail down approximately how many puzzles that would make per set of furniture. With around 15 furniture per set it's enough to make it interesting to decorate a room!

🪑Finding my own designs

Now it was time start researching themes for my own sets. I didn't really follow a rule there, mostly picked things I liked, but also added a couple of rodent themed one like cheese (even tho rodents don't eat cheese it's fun) and a rodent cage habitat.

To gather idea and refs I love using Miro. It makes it easy to share boards with people and I can access it online from different computers.

The 3 sets I'm showing there have all different vibes. It's important to take into consideration that you want a variety of colors, patterns and shapes!

For each set I spend a good amount of time looking for real furniture references, I decide for a type of shape I should focus on and a color palette to follow that matches the theme.

For example the Nordic Design set is very triangular because the goal is to make it look modern and avant-garde. Mushroom Log is all in the round shaped because the furniture will be made our of wood logs, etc.

When looking at the Animal Crossing sets you can see all their furniture looks super cohesive. They probably spend a lot of time on each design and have a team assigned to design all of them!
Being a solo artist making all those furniture, I have to find shortcuts to make it easier for me to produce that many assets in limited time.

Lets take a look at the Rainbow Pastel Set:

The main inspiration for this set was kids rooms and the block toys. I spent a bit of time sketching tons of very chunky furniture without having anything click, then made a lamp that looked like a single huge pencil standing up and it gave me an idea!

I decided to try to use that pencil as legs/structure part for all the other furniture so it would tie all of them together and also make it easier to model since I could reuse the same 3D model.

I also added big bolts on the furniture to make them looks like toys. Alternating with the rainbow colors and brown shade of wood to give the kid-toy feeling.


Another example from the Nordic Design Set: here I used a black metal frame as a structure on the side of almost all the pieces of furniture. The idea behind this was to mix metal and dark wood with triangular shapes to make the furniture looks very modern.

While observing Animal Crossing sets I realized they usually use one or two strong colors for a set. The astro series would be white and orange. Blue series is blue with small hints of yellow, etc.

During my trials and errors run with the first couple of designs I realized I was using too much colors on my furniture sets so I scaled it down (I had to redo those sets because of that later on).

After designing a couple of extravagant furniture sets, I went back to design a more bland one, that could fill in the gaps players could be missing when designing a home with a more visually complex set.

The goal was just to design a very plain, simple shaped set, so players could use toned down furniture alongside the more fancier ones!

I also made a list of basic props to model, mostly things you would find in a human home, to add a bit of fluff to player's designs.

I actually added much more items to the Basic set compared to the other ones because it has all the "normal" human-like house appliances! Alongside the many misc props, this all make a good pool of assets for the player to choose from to decorate their home!

This is something I realized after playing the latest two mainline Animal Crossing games (New Leaf and New Horizon): they both had a couple of very less flashy sets and I often found myself using a couple of those item to add a bit of variation to a home with more eccentric pieces.

This is what keeps it interesting to decorate in my opinion!

📝Where I found my references

To find furniture references I use a lot of Pinterest (now it's plagued by AI 💀), I also browse a lot of furniture websites like Ikea or whatever local brand that could give you inspiration!

Other resources that were shared with me:
https://www.archiexpo.com/
http://www.tribu-design.com/?lg=en
Designing furniture is a job in itself so take inspiration where you can and take shortcuts!

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That's it for now! This was a very broad overview, next time I'll probably write about the modeling/mapping texturing part so it'll be a bit more technical!

👋🐁