From tabletop mystery to mobile city - how Soft Boiled Games brought MicroMacro to Defold

Defold spotlights how Soft Boiled Games adapted MicroMacro: Downtown Detective from a tabletop mystery into a mobile-first game, with an upcoming Steam release also in the pipeline. Felix Weiler says the team wanted to preserve the board game's core appeal: one continuous city, recurring characters, and deduction built around spotting relationships across time and place.

The big design challenge was readability on a phone. A printed map gives players a full overview; mobile gives them a narrow window, so the team added interactive markers, navigation aids, and touch-friendly progression to keep players oriented without turning the experience into a guided tour.

Soft Boiled Games also leaned into digital-only affordances instead of copying the board game one-to-one. New case design takes advantage of features like Search Warrants, which let players inspect interiors and crime scenes, and Superzoom, which exposes tiny details that would be impractical on paper.

The studio says balancing freedom and guidance took extensive playtesting, and it is still exploring ways to support a harder, more open mode without leaving players lost. For developers, it is a useful example of how to translate a physical puzzle format into mobile without losing the investigative rhythm that makes it work.