Ask Jason Toff whether his Apple Design Award winner is a game or an app, and his answer is yes.

“There’s no one-sentence description for Rooms, and that can be a blessing,” laughs Toff, CEO and head designer of Things, Inc. “It’s not entirely a game, and it’s not entirely a tool. It’s more like a toy.”

It’s also a blank canvas, cozy game, coding teacher, and social network — but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. At its heart, Rooms is a collection of user-generated 3-D spaces that feels like the open-ended 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 whatever space you like: a college apartment, medieval castle chamber, floating fantasy realm, pirate ship, or a Weezer concert (really), to name just a few. The only limits are the room’s boundaries — and Rooms fans have even gotten around those. “Our 404 page is a room with no walls,” Toff says, “so people just started copying it to work around the constraint.”

ADA FACT SHEET

Rooms

• Winner: Visuals and Graphics
• Team: Things, Inc.
• Available on: iOS, iPadOS
• Team size: 4

Learn more about Rooms

Download Rooms from the App Store

In fact, that community element is a strong point: This creative tapestry of quirky games, tranquil havens, and clever ideas has been conjured by real people, which makes Rooms a social network as well. What’s more, users can click on each item to reveal its underlying code, offering them more options for customization.

To create Rooms — which, incidentally, won the ADA for Visuals and Graphics in games — Toff and cofounders Nick Kruge and Bruno Oliveira threw themselves back into their childhoods. “I was obsessed with Legos as a kid,” says Toff, not unexpectedly. “I found myself wondering, ‘What’s the digital equivalent of that?’”

Rooms isn’t just about rooms; creators have plenty of ways to noodle on their ideas.

Drawing on that inspiration — as well as Toff’s experiences with Kid Pix on his dad’s 1989-era Mac — the Rooms team began envisioning something that, as Oliveira says, kept the floor low but the ceiling high. “We wanted anyone from 4-year-olds to their grandparents to be able to use Rooms,” he says, “and that meant making something free-form and creative.”

It also meant building something that gave a sense of approachability and creativity, which led them right to voxels. “Blocks have a charm, but they can also be kind of ugly,” Toff laughs. “Luckily, Bruno’s were cute and soft, so they felt approachable and familiar.” And from Oliveira’s side, blocks offered a practical value. “It’s much easier to do 3-D modeling 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 Rooms, and that meant making something free-form and creative.

Jason Toff, CEO and head designer of Things, Inc.

Rooms launched in 2023 as a web-based app that included 1,000 voxel objects and allowed users to write their own code. It gained traction through both word of mouth and, more directly, a video that went viral in the cozy-gaming community. “All of a sudden, we had all these people coming,” says Oliveira, “and we realized we needed 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 the bulk of their time editing. “We were just shocked by how much time people were spending making rooms,” he says. “These weren’t quick five-minute projects. We did not anticipate that.”

Of course the Things, Inc. team rebuilt their own offices in Rooms.

All that building fed into a social aspect as well. Toff says most of the items in Rooms are now created, edited, and amplified by lots of different users. “Here’s a good example: We have a sway effect that makes things wave back and forth a little,” he says. “Someone realized that if they put some branches on a tree and added that effect, the tree immediately looked alive. Now everyone’s doing that. There’s a real additive effect to building in Rooms.” Today, the Rooms library contains more than 10,000 items.

There’s a lot of power under the hood, too. “Rooms 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. And adding native iOS elements — like sliders on the Explore page and a bottom navigation — gives 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 its community, the Rooms team is used to moving fast. “One day I said, ‘It would be cool if this had a D-pad and A/B buttons,” says Toff, “and about 10 hours later Bruno was like, ‘Here you go.’” On another lark, Toff mentioned that it would be fun to let users fly around their rooms, and Kruge and Oliveira promptly created a “camera mode” that’s come to be known internally as the “Jason-Cam.”

That’s satisfying to a team that simply set out to build a cutting-edge plaything. “We always had this metaphor that Rooms 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 swimming in the deep end. 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 design practices and philosophies from finalists and winners of the Apple Design Awards. 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 remarkable creations to life.