House Flipper 2 moves beyond the fixer-uppers to the house of your dreams

When House Flipper was released in 2018, the renovation sim had a ton of charm and potential that was realized via the game’s ongoing development and DLC. Over time, just like a good renovation project, the developers kept polishing, expanding, and upgrading it, turning it into a hit. 

The original game blew up, even going as far as to attract real plumbers and painters to play and critique the games' streamlined versions of their professions. With House Flipper 2 coming soon to the Epic Games Store, the series has never been in a better place for budding developers to build someone their dream homes. 

"While we were working on House Flipper, we were coming up with new ideas, things we would like to add but we knew we would not be ready to add them in time for House Flipper 1," Frozen District's Kris Krej said. "There are a lot of things we would like to add."

House Flipper never stopped undergoing development, even after the game had been out for years. By 2022, six separate DLC add-ons, along with many patches, had completely changed the game compared to how it looked when it launched. 

Developers Frozen District and Empyrean were inexperienced in 2016 when work on the first House Flipper began, meaning they couldn’t implement a number of the features they had wanted to. But soon after launching House Flipper in 2018, Frozen District senior developer Rafał Kańka started preparing House Flipper 2's architecture so that it could let players do things the dev team could only dream of in 2016.

That dream? A sandbox mode that would give players the freedom to build whatever came to mind: a house to live in or to sell, a mansion to decorate as their own or replicate whatever famous interior they wanted to walk through. Some players have built their own vaults from Fallout 4 or the Weasley residence from the Harry Potter franchise. 

"It is a powerful tool that's also a level creator," House Flipper 1 developer Jakub Bujas said. “Giving players the possibility to make their own creations using the same tools as our level designers use was the main goal during production."

House Flipper joins the likes of Fortnite and StarCraft in giving players a version of the tools the developers used to build the content that home flippers play through during the story campaign. The sandbox mode went through dozens of iterations to be as accessible as it is now. The studio even held sessions where every developer would focus on re-creating their favorite space in the sandbox mode so that they could make suggestions on how the UI might be changed to make it smoother. 

"All of our level designers work inside the game from the start, so all of our level designers are testers," Bujas said. "If they can create something, a player will be able to create the same thing."

Outside of the new sandbox mode, simply going through the motions of fixing up a house is streamlined in House Flipper 2. Players can now clone items, copy and paste styles, and redesign existing styles to match whatever aesthetic they are trying to emulate. New functional features—like creating connections between light switches and sources, help add little steps that players can take to make houses feel more like homes. 

Players have already dug into the sandbox modes to create modern, window-covered mansions inspired by those you clean in PowerWash Simulator, vintage cigar shops that feel like they are straight out of a fantasy epic, and even replications of their friends' homes. It’s also not just about creating homes—players can create custom jobs for other house flippers too. 

"It is a wonderful feeling when you can see that your game offers so many possibilities for unleashing player creativity," Bujas said. "It's gratifying to then see how players discover innovative ways to use your tools."

Everyone who worked on House Flipper will tell you that the team didn't know a lot about simulators when they set out to make this project, but that couldn't be further from the truth this time around. House Flipper 2 benefits from nearly a decade of experience earned by coming up with ideas, testing them out, and iterating on them. 

Just as with the original House Flipper, the development team has already laid out plans for upcoming updates, and they constantly update a public tracker so we'll never be out of the loop. It includes plans for multiplayer features in both the story and sandbox modes as well as updates for already-released content like the Garden Update. It's likely that House Flipper 2 will receive new content updates regularly for years following its initial launch.

House Flipper 2, complete with its new sandbox mode, is coming soon to the Epic Game Store. Can't wait? The original House Flipper is ready and available to satisfy your home renovation needs right now.