Need to escape for a while? Rooms is a delightful set of miniature interactive voxel worlds that can be toys or games, all living for free in the browser (or iOS app). In version 3.0, Rooms adds interactive actions in addition to coding.
It’s hard to describe Rooms, but they’re inexplicably satisfying. You might open this up in a browser tab or keep the app running on your phone. Maybe you get deep into some coding with its Lua scripting tools, or maybe navigate and play around for a minute here or there with other creations. A community has already populated Rooms with beautiful creations. It feels a bit like the wonders of Itch.io, but all in a shared cabinet of curios.
Try these couple of examples, for instance:
https://rooms.xyz/evjpg/onlooking
https://rooms.xyz/bookleaf/girlnamedrei
In other words, Rooms might be the closest to a very nerdy screen-based interactive dollhouse that a bunch of people are collectively building. It’s fascinating as a model of other possibilities, and I suspect game or coder types will have fun just using this as a ship-in-a-bottle prototype for other ideas.
I wrote about Rooms when it launched last year:
Since then, it’s really blossomed. You can build up your own room from scratch and add in items. (If you loved the original Sims and mostly enjoyed arranging or wished you had more control over what objects did – here you go.)
Coding is a fun way to get in there, and there are code templates – see also a tutorial series and thoughts on the journey from BASIC (and GeoCities!).
But now it’s possible to build up common interactions using a visual interface, with sounds and particles (rain, plasma) and dialog and more.
That’s of course far more practical on iOS than typing code, so you can make some fast interactions and always come back to your desktop browser for code. Here it is in iOS:
You can also use Rooms in unexpected ways with some of the recent feature additions. A video editor means you can build cute little voxel-powered narratives in the environment:
It’s just another example of new ideas in digital creativity. It’s the kind of fun tech that got me interested in computers in the first place. (Developer Things is even working on a mixed-reality version of these inventions with Apple Vision Pro.)
Oh and if you create something – or find a fun Room – let us know.