Ask Jason Toff if the Apple Design Award winner is a game or an app and his answer is yes.
“There is no one-sentence description for Accommodationand that can be a blessing,” laughs Toff, CEO and chief designer of Things, Inc. “It’s not entirely a game, nor is it entirely a tool. “It’s more like a toy.”
It’s also a blank canvas, a cozy game, a coding teacher, and a social network, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. In your heart, Accommodation is a collection of user-generated three-dimensional spaces that feels like the open world of the early internet. Start with an empty room or an existing template, then fill it with a variety of voxel decorations, items, pets, and avatars to create the space you want: a college apartment, a medieval castle chamber, a floating fantasy kingdom, a pirate ship, or a Weezer concert (for real), to name just a few. The only limits are the limits of the room, and Accommodation Fans have even shunned them. “Our 404 page is a room with no walls,” says Toff, “so people started copying it to work around the restriction.”
ADA FACT SHEET
Accommodation
- Winner: Images and graphics
- Equipment: Things, Inc.
- Available in: iOS, iPadOS
- Team size: 4
More information about the rooms
Download Rooms from the App Store
In fact, that community element is a strong point: this creative tapestry of quirky games, quiet havens and clever ideas has been created by real people, making Accommodation a social network too. What’s more, users can click on each element to reveal its underlying code, giving them more customization options.
to create Accommodation – which, by the way, won the ADA for images and graphics in games – Toff and co-founders Nick Kruge and Bruno Oliveira threw themselves back into their childhood. “As a kid I was obsessed with Legos,” Toff says, unsurprisingly. “I found myself wondering, ‘What’s the digital equivalent of that?'”
Accommodation It’s not just about rooms; Creators have many ways to develop their ideas.
Drawing on that inspiration, as well as Toff’s experiences with photo of the child on his father’s 1989-era Mac: the Accommodation The team began to imagine something that, as Oliveira says, would keep the floor low but the ceiling high. “We wanted anyone, from 4-year-olds to their grandparents, to be able to use Accommodation” he says, “and that meant doing something creative and free-form.”
It also meant building something that gave a feeling of accessibility and creativity, which led them directly to voxels. “Blocks have a charm, but they can also be a bit ugly,” laughs Toff. “Luckily, Bruno’s were nice and soft, so they felt approachable and familiar.” And for Oliveira’s part, the blocks offered practical value. “It is much easier to model in 3D with blocks,” says Oliveira. “You can just add or remove voxels whenever you want, which lowers the bar for everyone.”
We wanted anyone, from 4-year-olds to their grandparents, to be able to use Accommodationand that meant doing something creative and free-form.
Jason Toff, CEO and Chief Designer of Things, Inc.
Accommodation It was released in 2023 as a web-based application that included 1000 voxel objects and allowed users to write their own code. It gained traction both through word of mouth and, more directly, through a video that went viral in the welcoming gaming community. “Suddenly, all these people came in,” says Oliveira, “and we realized we needed to prioritize the mobile app. Nick said, ‘I think we can achieve feature parity with desktop on the iPhone screen,’ and we basically pulled a rabbit out of the hat.” Today, the vast majority of Accommodation Users are on mobile devices, where they spend most of their time editing. “We were surprised by the amount of time people spent making rooms,” he says. “These were not quick five-minute projects. We didn’t anticipate that.”
Of course, the Things, Inc. team rebuilt their own offices in Accommodation.
All this construction also fueled a social aspect. Toff says that most of the articles in Accommodation They are now created, edited and amplified by many different users. “This is a good example: we have a rocking effect that makes things move back and forth a little bit,” he says. “Someone realized that if they put some branches on a tree and added that effect, the tree immediately looked alive. Now everyone is doing that. There’s a real additive effect when building in Rooms.” Today, the Rooms library contains more than 10,000 items.
There’s plenty of power under the hood, too. “Rooms uses a Lua programming language that runs in a C++ context,” says Oliveira, “so it’s kind of Lua, locked in C++, locked in Unity, locked in iOS.” Each room, he says, is a new instance of Unity. And adding native iOS elements, like sliders on the Explore page and bottom navigation, provides what he calls the “chef’s kiss of design.”
An early sketch of Accommodation shows how the room layout was created early in the process.
Like your community, Accommodation The team is used to moving quickly. “One day I said, ‘It would be cool if this had a directional pad and A/B buttons,'” Toff says, “and about 10 hours later Bruno said, ‘Here you go.'” In another joke, Toff mentioned that it would be fun to let users fly around their rooms, and Kruge and Oliveira quickly created a “camera mode” known internally as “Jason-Cam.”
This is satisfying for a team that simply set out to build a cutting-edge toy. “We always had the metaphor that Rooms was a pool with a shallow side and a deep side,” says Oliveira. “It should be fun for people who dabble in the shallow end. But it should also be amazing for people who swim in the deep end. If you just want to see the rooms, you can do that. But you can also dive all the way in and write complicated code. There’s something for everyone.”
Meet the winners of the Apple Design Award 2024
Behind the Design is a series that explores the design practices and philosophies of Apple Design Awards finalists and winners. In each story, we go behind the screens with the developers and designers of these award-winning apps and games to discover how they brought their extraordinary creations to life.
