How Infold Games fashioned an open world for Infinity Nikki – Discover

Infinity Nikki is a literally glowing example of what video game graphics can be.

The fifth in a series of dress-up titles from Infold Games, Infinity Nikki is also the first to embrace elements of RPG action-adventure. But instead of tracking down weapons and battling bad guys, this installment finds its wide-eyed heroine solving puzzles by collecting enchanted outfits found throughout a series of wondrous lands.

Infinity Nikki

• Available on: iPhone, iPad
• Based in: Shanghai
• Awards: Apple Design Award winner for Visuals and Graphics (2025), App Store Awards Game of the Year finalist (2025), App Store Editors’ Choice

Download Infinity Nikki from the App Store >

The fashion-forward gameplay still remains, of course. Nikki’s dress sways and waves every step of the way, while capes sparkle and drift in the wind. Different outfits are imbued with different abilities that allow players to guide Nikki — and her cat companion, Momo — through clever puzzles. And from quaint cobblestone towns to distant mountains, every corner of the game’s Miraland — brought to life with cutting-edge visuals — is awash in beautifully realized lighting and effects from advanced shading techniques like Global Illumination. (Executive producer Kentaro Tominaga previously worked on several installments of the Legend of Zelda series.)

It’s a wonderland of texture, light, and animation — and the 2025 Apple Design Award winner for Visuals and Graphics. To find out more, we caught up with Douhu, Infinity Nikki’s lead gameplay systems designer for outfits; Ade, lead programmer; and Dodie, art director.

Why did you decide to make this fifth installment an open-world RPG?

Douhu: When we started thinking about this six years ago, we already knew it would be an open-world game. So we asked ourselves: How do we go about bringing Nikki into that space? And how do we set it apart from other open-world games on the market?

To make these worlds as immersive as we can, we keep an eye on all the details, all the time.

Douhu, lead gameplay systems designer for outfits

This is the first Nikki game to include action-adventure elements and light combat.

Douhu: Yes, but we knew that combat wouldn’t be part of the game’s core play. The Nikki series has such a defined style. We thought a lot about how to maintain that.

How many people worked on the visuals for this?

Douhu: Oh, it’s a huge team — roughly 800 people. It’s a fun but a complicated job. We have a lot of visual pipelines all going at once: cutscenes, the NPC ecosystem, lighting, performance. The production complexity is so high.

The payoff for that work seems to be everywhere: The game is full of fabrics, sparkles, environments, and natural elements.

Douhu: And we think about all of them. For instance, when Nikki runs up a flight of steps in a cutscene, we don’t want her to stamp her feet down. We want her to move lightly and elegantly. All the sounds you hear are based on real-world sounds, though we’ve added some imagination to them in post-production editing. To make these worlds as immersive as we can, we keep an eye on all the details, all the time.

Nikki’s double-jump is especially elegant; it’s almost like a glider coming in for the softest of landings.

Douhu: That’s because we want players to have plenty of time to experience the world. Our core gameplay is based on jumping, but it’s not a very quick motion. It’s slow, like a micro-response for that specific floating motion. And that’s because we want to let players breathe and appreciate all the details of Miraland.

What is Day 1 like on the visuals for something like this?

Douhu: Because this is our fifth game with Nikki, we already have the character and philosophy built out, so those first days are more about sketching out the new world and its different maps.

Ade: To start, we reconstruct the structure and physical performance of the fabrics in the engine, based mostly on reality. Then we’ll do extreme evolutions on the fabrics. We have so many fabric categories in our library, and a lot of those are heritage from previous titles. But we make all kinds of adjustments, and add all kinds of effects to make the game feel like it’s beyond reality.

Douhu: We do have a big closet in our office! But we want to emphasize that we’re not just exporting real fabrics or trying to recreate reality. We’re adding layers of fantasy. We add complicated embroideries, more patterns, and glittering special effects to depict a more whimsical, fantastic version of reality. That’s why Nikki’s outfits look more gorgeous than they would in real life. Hopefully!

Could you select an element in the game and share a little about how it was brought to life?

Dodie: Color has always been central to our art creation, so I’ll share two examples from Version 2.0: the five-star outfit Behind Prayers and the location called Snail Ranch.

The core design concept of Behind Prayers is ”a confined divine maiden,” so that meant a maximal design approach. The divine maiden longs for freedom, yet she’s draped in heavy layers of ornate garments and gemstones. These represent both sacred glory and the weight of restraint: dazzling and radiant, yet undeniably burdensome.

We chose gold as the primary color to express sanctity and brilliance, and we introduced touches of green to break potential visual monotony. We further embellished the outfit with a rich array of multicolored gemstones and enhanced it with prismatic sparkle effects, allowing it to shimmer vividly — even at night.

Snail Ranch, meanwhile, is the player’s first destination in Itzaland — the place where Nikki first encounters the Shroomlings and the snails.

The lighting in this area is intentionally bright and inviting. Sunlight filters through enormous leaves, creating a warm and relaxing atmosphere, while even small puddles along the path reflect the deep blue of the sky. The scene takes on a fairytale quality, inviting players to believe and lose themselves in the land.

Talk about your approach to creating these fabrics and outfits.

Ade: Infinity Nikki introduces a revolutionary material system. At the core is a re-engineered fabric algorithm that preserves the advantages of four-layer UV blending textures, while requiring only minimal parameter adjustments to accurately simulate a wide range of materials, including the natural coarseness of cotton and linen, the smooth sheen of silk and satin, as well as the delicate tactile qualities of various velvets and flannel. The system also provides deep support for custom reflections and diverse sparkle responses, making it easy to create distinctive highlights and dreamy glints, such as the unique interplay of gauze and silk in the Fairytale Swan outfit.

Visual richness in Infinity Nikki extends well beyond fabric. We developed a specialized jewelry material system using advanced algorithms to simulate the brilliance of gemstones, including complex refraction, 3S light transmission, and highly variable specular highlights, as seen in the pearls and diamonds of the Fairytale Swan outfit. Dynamic presentation has also broken through previous limitations. To support animated patterns in high-end outfits such as Threads of Reunion, the team developed an innovative solution to mitigate Unreal Engine 5’s interference from engine-native motion blur on UV animations. This enables crisp and vivid celestial motion effects: three independent orbits allow full customization of planetary shapes, angular velocities, and trajectories, layered with flowing asteroid belts and lunar phase changes.

And how do you approach physical simulation?

Ade: We make flexible use of skeletal physics and Chaos Cloth to achieve natural, expressive motion. Through proprietary skeletal chain algorithms and enhanced cloth solvers, the team replaces costly and unstable traditional collision-based algorithms with more stable and controllable constraint-based algorithms. Let’s take Nikki running in a loose dress as an example. We introduced a flexible and soft-driven constraint stage during preprocessing, ensuring that even under dramatic movements, the initial garment avoids clipping the body.

While pursuing physical realism, the system also preserves the intended artistic silhouette of garments, particularly structured garments with petticoat. These outfits must flow naturally like fabric, while maintaining behavior consistent with their physical construction. Our custom algorithms incorporate collision handling between different garment types and multiple clothing layers, enabling free outfit combinations without sacrificing stability. By carefully balancing visual effects and performance, we achieve consistent results across multiple platforms.

Keep reading

Developer stories explore best practices and philosophies from some of the most inventive developers in the Apple community. In each story, we go behind the screens with developers, designers, and engineers to find out how they brought their remarkable creations to life.

Browse all developer stories >