A year ago today we released Simulacrum: Chapter One, time sure does fly! To celebrate this, let's take a little dive into the game's distant past. But firstly, we want to thank everyone who has supported us. It's been wonderful watching you play the game and hearing your feedback.

Simulacrum had a very humble origin. It was supposed to be a small, short game that would run on your browser through a webgame portal like Kongregate, planned as a side-project to another survival horror game we were working on at the time. This meant the game had to squeeze into just 20 megabytes! A tough task for a 3D game. This meant no cutscenes, no combat and overall a smaller game. We had to be smart about reusing textures and models and not over-detailing the environment. Ultimately we succeeded in getting the game size under 20mb.

Then Google killed the asset used to run Unity games on the web.

At this point we had two choices. Use the experimental WebGL technology that Unity had developed to replace the plugin Google killed or turn it into a standalone game you could download and run. At the time, and still to this day, WebGL had many flaws and performance issues so of course, as you all know, we went for a desktop game.

With file size no longer a restriction, we took the opportunity to beef up the game! Texture resolutions were increased (though we made the conscious decision to keep it low enough to have a distinct PS2-era feel). New, more detailed models were created. A few environments were expanded including Abigail's apartment where additional rooms were added, and we made the area for the chase scene larger with an extra puzzle. We also added fully voiced cutscenes and several translations! No longer a tiny little side project but something to pour all our effort into, Simulacrum was born as the survival horror game we always wanted to create.

So again, thank you everyone who made this game both possible and a success. Thank you to our wonderful translators, who let the game reach far further than we ever thought it would, also to our families and friends for giving us support and encouragement through and beyond the development of the game. Thanks to our testers who helped shape a better version of the game for the rest of you. Thank you to Olivia, the talented voice actress who brought Abigail to life (and for bringing the team together that would ultimately make this game) and finally to our awesome fans for playing and sharing their experiences with Simulacrum. We couldn't have done it without you all.