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Designing for Coziness

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Featured Blog | This community-written post highlights the best of what the game industry has to offer. Read more like it on the Game Developer Blogs. What do Dark Souls, Harvest Moon, The Witcher 3, and Night in the Woods have in common? This analysis offers a philosophy and tips for achieving cozy aesthetics, mechanics, narratives, and work environments. March 5, 2018 What follows is a very brief summary of an analysis performed by a group of designers at Project Horseshoe in the fall of 2017, including Jake Forbes, Daniel Cook, Chelsea Howe, Squirrel Eisorloh, Dan Hurd, Anthony Ordon, Joshua Diaz, and Tanya X. Short (the editor of this summary and the one to be blamed for any mistakes, omissions, or misrepresentations). To read the full paper, visit the Project Horseshoe website. Popular games such as Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley offer coziness as a core gameplay value proposition to players, while the more stressful core gameplay of Dark Souls or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of

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