Ask Jason Toff if his Apple Design Award winner is a game or an app, and his answer is yes.
“There is no description of a sentence for roomsand that can be a blessing,” laughs Toff, CEO and chief designer of Things, Inc. “It’s not quite a game, and it’s not quite a tool. It’s more than a toy.”
It’s also a blank canvas, cozy game, coding professional and social network – but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. in the heart, rooms is a collection of user-generated 3-D spaces that feels like the open world of the early Internet. Start with an empty room or existing template, then fill it with an array of voxel decorations, items, pets, and avatars to create anything you want: a college apartment, medieval castle chamber, floating fantasy realm, pirate ship, or a Weezer concert (for real), to name just a few. The only boundaries are the boundaries of the room – and rooms Fans even care about that. “Our 404 page is a space without walls,” says Toff, “so people just started copying it to work around the limitation.”
ADA FACT SHEET
rooms
- Winner: Visuals and graphics
- team: The story of Things, Inc.
- Available at: iOS, iPadOS
- Team Size: 4
Learn more about rooms
Download Room from the App Store
Indeed, the community element is a strong point: this creative tapestry of quirky games, soothing havens and clever ideas has been conjured up by real people, making rooms a social network as well. What’s more, users can click on any element to reveal its underlying code, giving them more options for customization.
To create rooms – which incidentally won the ADA for visuals and graphics in games – Toff and co-founders Nick Kruge and Bruno Oliveira threw themselves back into their childhood. “I was obsessed with Legos as a kid,” says Toff, not unexpectedly. “I asked myself, ‘What’s the digital equivalent of that?'”
rooms it’s not just about rooms; Creators have many ways to express their ideas.
Draw on this inspiration – as well as Toff’s experiences Children’s pix on his father’s 1989-era Mac – the rooms Team began to imagine something that, as Oliveira says, kept the floor low but the ceiling high. “We wanted everyone from 4-year-olds to their grandparents to be able to use it rooms“, he says, “and that meant doing something free-form and creative.”
It also meant building something that had a sense of approach and creativity, which led them directly to voxels. “Blocks have a charm, but they can also be ugly,” laughs Toff. “Fortunately, Bruno’s were kind and gentle, so they felt approachable and familiar.” And from Oliveira’s side, the blocks offered practical value. “It’s much easier to make 3D models with blocks,” says Oliveira. “You can just add or remove voxels whenever you want, which lowers the bar for everyone.”
We wanted everyone from 4-year-olds to their grandparents to use it roomsand that means doing something free-form and creative.
Jason Toff, CEO and Chief Designer of Things, Inc.
rooms launched in 2023 as a web-based app containing 1,000 voxel objects and allowing users to write their own code. It gained traction through both word of mouth and more directly a video that went viral in the casual gaming community. “Suddenly we had all these people coming,” says Oliveira, “and we realized we had to prioritize the mobile app. Nick was like, ‘I think we can get feature parity with desktop on the iPhone screen,’ and we basically pulled a rabbit out of a hat. Today, the vast majority of rooms users are on mobile, where they spend most of their time editing. “We were just shocked at how much time people spent making rooms,” he says. “These weren’t quick five-minute projects. We didn’t anticipate that.”
Of course, Things, Inc. Team rebuilt their own offices rooms.
All this building also fed a social aspect. Toff says most of the articles rooms are now created, modified and enhanced by many different users. “Here’s a good example: We have a sway effect that moves things back and forth a little bit,” he says. “Someone realized that if they put a few branches on a tree and added that effect, the tree immediately looked alive. Now everyone is doing it. It’s a real additive effect to build in rooms.” Today, the room library contains more than 10,000 items.
There’s also plenty of power under the hood. “Raim uses a Lua scripting language that runs in a C++ context,” says Oliveira, “so it’s kind of Lua, encased in C++, encased in Unity, encased in iOS.” Every room, he says, is a new Unity instance. Adding native iOS elements—like sliders on the Explore page and bottom navigation—is what he calls the “design chef’s kiss.”
An early sketch of rooms shows how the room design came together early in the process.
Like his community, the rooms The team is used to moving quickly. “One day I said, ‘It would be cool if this had a D-pad and A/B buttons,'” Toff says, “and about 10 hours later Bruno was like, ‘Here you go.’ On another lark, Toff said it would be fun to fly users around their rooms, and Kruge and Oliveira immediately created a “camera mode” that “Jason knows internally.”
That’s satisfying for a team that simply set out to build a state-of-the-art toy. “We always had this metaphor that the room was a swimming pool with a shallow side and a deep side,” says Oliveira. “It should be fun for people dabbling in the shallow side. But it should also be amazing for people to swim in the deep. If you just want to look at rooms, you can. But you can also dive all the way down and write complicated code. There’s something for everyone.”
Meet the 2024 Apple Design Award winners
Behind the Design is a series that explores the design practices and philosophies of the finalists and winners of the Apple Design Awards. In each story, we go behind the scenes with the developers and designers of these award-winning apps and games to discover how they brought their remarkable creations to life.