Animal Crossing: New Horizons will give players more options and freedom to customize their island than any previous game in the series. Thanks to a browser game called Happy Island Designer, eager fans can get a head start on planning out their new village before New Horizons even comes out.
Created by Github user Eugeneration, the in-browser mini-game consists of a map of an island that players can customize by adding trees, rivers, and buildings. New Horizons lets you choose where fellow villagers decide to live in addition to plotting the overall development of the community and its new public buildings and shops. In Happy Island Designer, you can start getting a feel for how you want to lay out your town.
In another first for the series, New Horizons will also let you eventually begin to terraform your island, building up the land in some places while carving out holes for ponds or rivers elsewhere. You will also be able to plant flowers, move trees around, and build bridges. It’s a lot, but Happy Island Designer makes it much easier to wrap your mind around how your want your finished island to look.
Each space on Happy Island Designer’s grid is intended to match up pretty closely with the area players will be exploring in the finished Animal Crossing game. While you can’t import your designs into New Horizons, you can still download them and pull them back up when you’re ready to get to work.