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
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.” Tod