to be a colleague of Mikael at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency. Bigge is an old friend of Mikael's. Stina is Carol's oldest friend in Sweden. All of the cast members have other careers. Filming Practically all of the games in the series take place in summer. This is because of the challenges of shooting during Swedish winter: too dark, few hours of sunshine, and packed streets. In addition there could be continuity errors created because of weather inconsistency: snow-filled one week and clear the next. Mikael shoots the field surveys early in the morning - starting at 4:00 am - due to the lighting and empty streets. When people unavoidably end up in his photos, he retouches them out. As the same locations are visited multiple times throughout the stories, he thinks it would be strange to the player to see the same character or moving object there at different times or on different days. Set in Mikael's hometown of Norrköping, Sweden, the games use photography and local history of the city as a backdrop." Carol Reed's in-game apartment is Mikael's real life apartment, which he photographed for the game; meanwhile the dacha seen in the game is Eleen's summer holiday house. Sometimes he travels outside of the city. For instance the location of the in-game "Dead City" was an abandoned leper colony in Tenerife, Arico, Spain. Writing For the first few games in the series, Mikael took photos in summer then spent the next 6 months creating the game from the footage. The 2013-released title Cold Case Summer: The ninth Carol Reed Mystery took a post-production of 13 months to complete, and Mikael foresaw future games taking about the same amount of time. He put this down to three things: the games having a larger scope, him taking longer to take the photos, and him being slower to create the games due to his age. In terms of the tone, Mikael commented "Balancing light and dark, good and evil, etc, is no particular problem. That's simply the way life is". Design In regards to the gameplay mechanics, Mikael wanted to keep the interface as simple as possible and not provide a barrier between the player and the gaming experience. This includes simplifying mechanics like saving/loading, accessing the inventory, and mouse clicking hotspots. While the games were originally created using Adventure Maker, Mikael switched to Wintermute Engine for East