For most of the year Haus Rules had a normal undo button. Press it, and the last piece you placed disappears. It worked, nobody complained, and we still took it out last month.
The problem showed up in playtests. People would place a piece, frown, undo, place it again one cell over, undo, and repeat that ten or fifteen times. They weren't thinking about the house anymore. They were scrubbing through options until something clicked, and when the level was solved it didn't feel like they had solved it.
What we did instead
Now there is one button, and it is called respawn. It clears the plot and then rebuilds your house from the ground up, one piece at a time, in the order you placed them. You can stop the rebuild at any point and continue from there.
It sounds slower, and it is, by a couple of seconds. But watching your own house go back up does something undo never did: you see the whole build again, and the mistake is usually obvious about halfway through. Most testers started stopping the rebuild one or two pieces before the bad one, without being told to.
Small things that made it work
- Each piece blinks twice when it lands. Fast enough not to annoy, slow enough to count.
- The rebuild speeds up if you hold the button, so long builds don't drag.
- There is no penalty and no counter. We don't track how many times you respawn.
Yes, the studio name came first and the mechanic came later. We're aware of how that looks.
Next up: we're cutting a short demo with the first neighbourhood. If everything goes to plan, it will be out early next year.
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