I used a videogame to design my house

Don’t laugh. It worked.

So I wanted to design my house. Tried sticking to “professional” tools. SketchUp. AutoCAD. Headache. I spent 3 hours trying to make a wall 3 meters high.

Then I was playing a game called Enshrouded. (Building survival game). And I thought… wait a minute.

Gamifying Architecture

I downloaded House Flipper 2. Yes, the game where you clean trash. But it has a “Sandbox Mode”. You can build walls. Paint them. Put furniture. AND… it has a grid system. One block = roughly 20-30cm (or whatever, you can estimate).

Why it’s better than CAD

1. You can walk inside it. In CAD, you look at lines. In the game, I walked into the bathroom and realized: “Whoa, this is too small. My knees will hit the door.” Deleted the wall. Moved it. Solved a problem I wouldn’t have seen on paper.

2. Lighting Games have ray-tracing now. I put a window on the East side. Simulated morning. “Too much glare on the TV.” Moved the window.

3. It’s fast. I designed the whole ground floor in 2 hours. Would have taken me a week in SketchUp.

The Architect’s Reaction

I sent the screenshots to my architect. I thought he’d laugh. He said: “This is actually helpful. I see exactly what you want.” He took my “game design” and imported it into Revit (the real software). Fixed the structural stuff (columns, beams). But the flow? The layout? That was all from the game.

Recommendation

If you can’t visualize 2D plans (I can’t)… Play a game. House Flipper 2. The Sims 4. Valheim (maybe?). Just build it. Walk through it. Then show it to the pro.

(That’s my living room in the game. Real one looks almost the same now).