Infinity Nikki was developed in secret for over a year, calling in former Breath of the Wild and The Witcher 3 talent to realize its open world

After years of being a mobile-only series, Infold Games is launching the big new open world adventure Infinity Nikki on PC next month. The developer is celebrating the near fruition of several years of work with a short documentary looking back on Nikki’s journey to a bigger new Miraland and way more platforms.

Infinity Nikki’s development journey began in December 2019, Infold Games’ chief technology officer Fei Ge says, when the series’ producer expressed interest in working on an open world Nikki game.

“At that time the project was kept a secret,” Fei says. “So we rented an additional workspace of about 50 to 60 square meters separate from our main office. Then we gradually began recruiting and assembling our initial team, working on ideas, laying the foundation and building the infrastructure. We continued in this way for over a year.”

It’s common enough for developers to work on a game for multiple years before publicly announcing it—which Infold Games did with the first Infinity Nikki trailer two years later in 2022—but it does sound a little like this massive new direction for the series was at least a little secret from the rest of the team for a period of time, too.

I’ve no doubt it was quite the undertaking for a formerly mobile gacha dress up series to expand into the whole open world adventure that Infinity Nikki has become. Infold details some parts of that journey in the rest of the development documentary: how its producer sculpted a miniature version of its giant Millewish Tree area out of clay as inspiration for developers in the office and how its musicians traveled to Hungary to incorporate certain instruments into the soundtrack.

You’ll also spot in the doc some of the external talent that Infold worked with: Kentaro “Tomiken” Tominaga, designer on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Andrzej Dybowski, a concept artist from The Witcher 3. Those are some powerful resume namedrops to call in.

As it goes for pre-release development docs, this is of course mostly fluff and getting to hear from developers all the parts of the game they were excited to work on. Though I will say I’m pretty psyched to see the Millewish tree area in-game at launch. Truly, nothing beats a really bigass tree with a village inside it.

Infinity Nikki has been referring to itself as “the coziest open-world game” and though I had some initial fears about the freemium gacha game style barging into cozy gaming, I am ultimately as weak as anyone else and have wound up rather excited about the possibility of Nikki leading the way for dress-up games on PC.

We’ll find out soon enough if my called shot has any merit, because Infinity Nikki is launching on December 5 on mobile, PS5, and PC through Epic Games or its standalone launcher.

Oh, and not for nothing, but if you’re a gacha pro who knows the ropes, make sure to bookmark my list of Infinity Nikki codes where I’ll be logging the launch giveaways you’ll be able to redeem as soon as they’re announced.