Behind the Shelves

How This Started

ASMR Organizer Master began as a side project in late 2023. I was watching my roommate restock her fridge after a grocery run — the way she rotated jars to find the right gap, the small satisfaction when a bottle clicked into place. It occurred to me that this was a puzzle nobody had digitized properly. There were organizing apps, sure, but they felt transactional. Score-based. Competitive in ways that stripped away the actual pleasure of the activity.

I mentioned it to two friends over dinner in San Diego's North Park neighborhood. One of them, a sound designer who had worked on indie games, immediately understood the audio angle. The other, a UX researcher, started sketching interaction models on a napkin. By January 2024, we had a rough prototype that involved nothing but a fridge and twelve jars. It was ugly. It was also surprisingly engaging.

What We Build

We make a single mobile game that lets people organize virtual spaces. That's it. No spin-off titles, no franchise extensions, no merchandise store. The game includes seven organizing scenarios at launch, with additional content packs available as optional purchases. Every scenario is designed around real-world references — actual fridges, actual suitcases, actual cosmetic bags that we measured and photographed.

What We Deliberately Don't Build

• No social features. The game is intentionally solitary. We removed friend lists and chat during prototyping because testers consistently reported that social elements introduced anxiety.
• No competitive mechanics. No leaderboards, no timed challenges, no seasonal rankings. Relaxation and competition occupy different emotional registers.
• No data harvesting beyond basic analytics. We collect crash reports and anonymous usage patterns to fix bugs. We do not sell data, share it with advertisers, or use it for behavioral targeting.

Our Design Methodology

Every organizing scenario in the game follows the same four-step design process, which we refined over roughly eighteen months of iteration.

Step one: physical reference. Before we design anything digital, someone on the team photographs and measures a real-world version of the space. For the fridge scenario, that meant opening four different refrigerators in team members' homes and documenting shelf dimensions, item counts, and the specific moments where spatial reasoning kicked in — usually around the condiment shelf, where bottles of varying heights create a natural sorting challenge. We found that the most satisfying organizing moments happen when constraints feel physical rather than arbitrary.

Step two: sound mapping. Each item gets a unique placement sound recorded from physical objects. We don't use stock sound libraries for this. During the spring of 2025, our sound designer spent three weeks recording placement sounds in a small studio near downtown San Diego. Glass jars on metal shelves. Plastic containers on wood. Cardboard boxes sliding against each other. About 140 of the 200-plus recordings made it into the final game. The rejected sounds weren't bad — they just didn't feel right in context.

Step three: playtest-driven difficulty. We don't set difficulty curves on paper and then implement them. Instead, we build levels at what we think is the right challenge, hand them to playtesters, and observe where people get stuck or bored. If more than 30% of testers fail a level without understanding why, we redesign it. If testers complete a level too quickly without any moment of genuine spatial problem-solving, we add constraints. This process typically takes two to six weeks per scenario.

Step four: accessibility review. After a scenario passes playtesting, we run it through an accessibility checklist. Can it be played one-handed? Are the items distinguishable by shape, not just color? Does the text meet minimum size requirements on small screens? We found early on that several colorblind testers couldn't distinguish between certain jar labels, which led us to add shape-based identifiers alongside color coding.

The Team

We are a small team based in San Diego, California, led by Thomas Lewis (game designer). The founding group also includes a sound designer and a UX researcher. We work with additional artists and developers on a contract basis as project needs arise. For press inquiries or collaboration proposals, please reach out through our contact page.

Operating Entity

ASMR Organizer Master is operated by OceanView, based at Broadway, San Diego, CA 40249. For formal inquiries, please use our contact page.

Page Updates

This page was last updated on June 5, 2026. We revise it as the project evolves. Significant changes are noted with a date stamp.