To game designers, Blendo Games' Skin Deep might seem like a contradiction. The game is set in a wacky offbeat universe like the kinds seen in Quadrilateral Cowboy and 30 Flights of Loving. It's also an "immersive sim" game, a systems-driven genre defined by clearly actionable cause-and-effect. Notable immersive sim games like Dishonored and Deus Ex won players over sometimes by giving them superhuman abilities, but those abilities are often grounded by some understanding of how they warp reality, making it easy to understand the cause-and-effect loop of say, mind controlling a guard and walking him off a cliff instead of fighting him.The world, environments, and objects of Skin Deep don't always have that same relationship with reality. In a world where cats pilot spaceships and players take on the role of an "insurance commando," boxes of deodorant, pepper grinders, and soap are core pieces of players' toolkit, and are often more valuable than conventional weapons like guns and grenades. Each object is capable of setting off a Rube-Goldberg chain of reactions that could either knock out a guard or blow the player out a window into space (which is fine, they have a third lung).How do developers like Skin Deep creative director Bendon Chung and narrative lead Laura Michet keep that chaos in check? And how they do it in a way that ensures the player understands the cause-and-effect of the world around them? According to the them, it all starts with in-game elements like warning labels on objects, and scales up to complex "event logs" essential for players and designers alike.Related:Skin Deep wants players to read warning labelsLet's say a player needs to liberate a key from a space pirate in Skin Deep. In another immersive sim like Dishonored, they might drop on them from above and kill him, pickpocket him, or maybe impersonate another guard and tell him to hand the key over.In Skin Deep, they might throw a bar of soap at the guard, then a box of powdered deodorant, then a lit lighter, setting them on fire as they wiggle on the slippery ground. Problem solved, right?Maybe not. If the explosion blew a fuel line in the wrong spot at the wrong time, it might launch a basketball at the player's head. Or if another guard heard the noise and slipped on a banana peel on the way to investigate, they might trigger a combat alarm. Now there's a flying robot with a blade for a nose hunting the player and you're starting to understand how things get a liiiiiitle out of hand on a game like this.Related:Chung laughed when I described a scenario like this to him in our call—one that ended with the head of a space pirate being zipped into the "lost and found" chute. He and Michet said that in a game like Skin Deep, helping players understand those systems-driven escalating incidents starts with good old-fashioned warning labels... the kind many people ignore in real life.Most objects in the game have a warning label of some sort that can be viewed by holding down the "shift" key or a controller button. Deodorant boxes, for instance, have a warning explicitly calling out their flammability. It's a quick way to introduce what he called "cartoon logic" not seen in other games in the genre.Labels like these are unusual for the immersive sim genre, which usually put players in the roles of spies and assassins in hostile environments. Players are usually briefly introduced to separate game systems and then expected to discover other interactions on their own. Skin Deep's labels also aren't necessarily "realistic," often taking up excessive physical space on the object in question, again hewing closer to cartoon logic over real-world logic.Image via Blendo Games/Annapurna Interactive."We want to be pretty forgiving," Chung said when referencing the myriad interactions, saying Blendo's goal was for players to find the consequences of their actions more "interesting than painful." For instance, the game cuts off the risk of explosive decompression by letting the player character breathe in outer space. If they get blown out a window, the guards will likely just think they're dead while they circle around to find an airlock.Related:Chung said that this kind of "Looney Tunes"-style thinking helped the Blendo team design the myriad interactions, because it turns out players are more familiar with cartoon logic than you might think. "People have an understanding of how things work with exaggerated physics," he said.But before you expect players to embrace the full ethos of the Acme Corporation, be aware that you've got to keep the Rube-Goldberg machine in check."The game was too chaotic for a while"The chain reactions and surreal setting of Skin Deep can be a lot to take in, and according to Michet, the biggest challenge of finishing the game was that for a while, it was just "too chaotic.""Everything is systemic," added Chung. "An issue that we had for a while was when anything happened, it caused a Rube-Goldberg chain reaction of events to [take place], and then the chain reaction went on for so long that at the end of the chain, it was just completely incomprehensible."Players might toss an object in one room and minutes later, find a dead guard a guard in another room, with zero context for what caused their untimely demise.One way this reigned in was through extremely obvious "signposting." When players knock down a guard, the game freeze-frames to show the precise object interaction that incapacitated them. Toss a lighter at a leaking fuel vent, and when the guard goes down, the game freezes, letterboxes pop up, and they'll see arrows pointing to both the lighter and the vent. If they shoot a guard and a bullet does them in, it will only label the bullet.Next, the Blendo team cooked up an "event log" that kept a longer record of the interactions leading to that freeze-frame moment. There are two versions of that log in Skin Deep. One is visible to the player, and one kept invisible for all but the developers. The visible one can be seen in full while the game is paused, but a short record of recent events pops up in the player's view as they navigate the space. It's useful for more subtle interactions, like if a player drops a can, and a guard hears the noise, but the player doesn't hear the bark playing due to another audio cue.Image via Blendo Games/Annapurna Interactive.Meanwhile, the second version of the log is reserved for Chung, Michet, and the collaborators. There are an intense number of subtle interactions that the player doesn't need to know about, but the Blendo team would for bugfixing. Michet said the events shown in the simplified log were filtered by studying what was "actionable" for the player.Finally—sometimes you just have to tell your game "hey, the party's over." The Blendo team had to create cutoff points for interacting events once they ran far past the point of relevancy.After all, the point of Skin Deep isn't to fully simulate the risks of close-quarters combat on volatile spaceships—it's to let players fulfill the fantasy of being "a frustrated expert who has a lot of friends at work who care about her a little bit more than she realizes," per Michet's description.And once players learn to embrace the chaos of Skin Deep, they'll start to live that fantasy themselves. As Michet put it, "I think as people get more confident and move through the first couple levels that onboard them into various mechanics, they will start to realize how crazy they can be and how easily they can get away with being really goofy in this game."