Simulacra 2 dev opens up about the challenges of creating a mystery game inside of a cell phone UI

There have been plenty of text adventures and mystery games over the years, but the Simulacra series aims to do something different. The game takes place within a cell phone, and you're restricted to the cell phone's user interface for the entire experience. As you might expect, that can make for some tough development situations. Check out what Jeremy Ooi, co-founder of Kaigan Games, had to say about the game's development below.

Working around the design space turned out to be a huge challenge, and it’s something that we are still discovering today. The first thing that we needed was to establish our spaces and their functions. For spaces within mystery games, you can use environment design, character design, dialogue, and movement, either in parts or in combination, to paint out a proper scene. When it comes to a phone UI, your scenes are locked into one place in specific apps, where each app represents an aspect of your space, often without much context. If you’re looking at chats, it's mostly dialogue. If you’re looking at the gallery, it's mostly pictures and videos. If it’s “Jabbr” (our version of Twitter), it's mostly social media noise. The idea is that we need to establish what the identity of these spaces are and how to weave them together so we can give players a narrative that they can follow.