work on the game began in november 2012; pope used his personal financial reserves from his time at naughty dog for what he thought would be a few weeks worth of effort to complete and then move onto a more commercially viable title. pope used the haxe programming language and the nme framework, both open-source. he was able to build up structures he and his wife developed for "helsing's fire", an ios game they developed after moving to japan, as this provided the means to set how much information about a character could or could not be shown to the player. this also enabled him to include random and semi-random encounters, in which similar events would occur in separate games, but the immigrant's name or details would be different. much of the game's design was about the purposely-"clunky" user interface elements of checking paperwork, something that pope was inspired by from his earlier programming experiences from using visual programming languages like hypercard. pope found that there was a very careful balance of what rules and randomness could be introduced without overwhelming the player or causing the balance of the game to falter, and cut back on some of the randomness he initially wanted. pope attempted to keep the narrative non-judgemental about the choices the player made, allowing them to imagine their own take on the events, and further kept elements like the player-character's family status screen shown at the end of each day simple so that it would not affect the player's take on these results.