Mimic Interview: Ryan Laley on Asymmetric Horror and Social Deduction

Ryan Laley is a game developer, consultant and educator who has spent the past eight years building an impressive library of Unreal Engine tutorials on YouTube. With more than 1,700 videos covering everything from individual engine features to broader development workflows, his channel has become a valuable resource for both professional and hobbyist developers looking to learn more about Unreal Engine.

Alongside his consulting work, Ryan is currently working on Mimic, a game that immediately struck me as something particularly unique, and frankly incredibly cool: An asymmetric social deduction horror experience inspired by Sci-Fi-Horror greats such as The Thing and the Alien films.

I got the opportunity to sit down with Ryan at this year’s Gamescom to talk about Mimic, its development journey, and what makes this title so unique in particular.

Editorial Note: This interview was recorded on Thursday, the 27th of August, 2026. I transcribed the audio verbatim, marking any additions to the transcript with square brackets and omissions from the script with round brackets. Some questions have been adjusted to better fit the answers. 

The interview appointment itself was arranged through Uberstrategist, a PR firm that reached out to me for the game. Beyond that, Ryan was also kind enough to provide me with a key for Mimic, without any expectation of coverage or prior agreement to do so.

What is Mimic about?

So, Mimic is an online multiplayer, asymmetric horror game where players have to work together to leave the ship, but also have to deduce who amongst them they can actually trust. As one of them will be the Mimic Alien, hunting them all down as well.

Whilst doing all that, there’s an AI android who is pursuing them throughout the whole entire maze of halls and trying to kill them all and stop them from leaving the ship.

So what happens if the Mimic gets caught by this android?

Same deal, they get killed.

But the Mimic can survive. They can lay an egg if they’re in Mimic form. So they are currently starting off in human form. At any point, they can tear off their skin, pop out, go on the hunt, attack players and lay an egg. When they lay an egg, that means they can respawn if they are killed by the android and rejoin the match.

What sets Mimic apart from other social deduction online games?

So, in this game, we separate ourselves from many other social deduction games by giving the player the ultimate survival horror [experience] where they have no weapons to fight back with. They have nothing they can do apart from run and hide.

This really plays into the horror aspect, and so deducing the enemies is not as easy for them to do when they have no weapons to fight against them. Instead, what they have to do is throw suspicion on other players, and when they do that, the android is their weapon.

The Android AI is going around the halls, chasing them much like the alien in Alien: Isolation, chasing them around and hunting them down.

You can also hook up to Twitch, and Twitch chat can also participate by voting and controlling where the Android goes and attacks other players as well. But I’m sure the Twitch chat won’t be trolly at all. They’ll be nice and friendly and won’t cause any problems for you, the player.

How does that work? How do you integrate a Twitch chat into a game like this? Is it like an extension or chat-based?

Yeah, so it’s just one of the APIs we have available to us. So we implement it inside the Unreal Engine, and (…) you put in whatever channel you want it to listen to.

So every player can make their own channel be listened to in their own client. And all it does is look for their client’s audience and what their chat is saying. And when the chat (…) votes or suss[es] another player’s name, that person will get a vote against them, and the android will start hunting whoever has the most votes.

I see. And the win condition is that you survive together and get to the end?

Yeah, correct. So the way you win the game is to leave the map.

And you leave the map by completing the objectives. But if you are a crew member, you win by leaving without the mimic in your party. If the mimic is in your party, when you leave, you lose. The mimic wins, obviously, when they leave the map.

Now, to make things more complicated for the crew members, they might have to contend with an agent. This is a 50% role, so it may appear or may not appear. But the agent is a human character who is on the mimic side. And their goal is to make sure the mimic is undetected and wins with them. They can do this by sabotaging doors and by locking them.

They can also send the Android and control where the Android goes more directly by bringing up their tablet PDA, as well as many other little benefits they have available to them to sort of change the tide of the match.

Now, looking at the footage, I see a lot that reminds me of Dead Space and a little bit of Alien: Isolation with the environment and everything. Are there any specific inspirations that you took?

Oh, yeah, I originally was inspired by the thing.

We really wanted to capture the sort of gameplay mechanics that you see in the film, The Thing. So we turned it into this, the Mimic, and we were inspired by the likes of Alien films, Event Horizon, Sunshine, Predator, Terminator, all these sort of classic horror films from the past. And so each level is actually inspired by that. So the level we’re launching early access in is called the Icarus, and this is inspired by films like Alien. Our second level, which will be coming shortly after Early Access, is an Arctic-based level on a planet, inspired by The Thing.

The Thing, yeah.

And our third level is inspired by Event Horizon in a space station. So we are taking deep inspiration from our favourite horror films of the past and really bringing them into the new age with this new IP with Mimic.

What’s the hardest part about developing a game like this, especially being a social deduction, it’s multiplayer focused, there’s going to be a lot of people playing it, there’s probably a lot of QA for each individual added person.

Yeah, it is a lot of work, especially for a solo developer like myself; it can be very difficult to test and try out multiplayer. Thankfully, we have got a community of great followers who are supporting us and helping us play-test the game throughout the year, and they’ve given us great feedback in the run-up to our early access launch, and we’re looking to get even more feedback between early access and a 1. 0 launch in the years to come.

When is the game set to launch into early access?

So it’s coming out in early access on October 27th, and a demo will be out early October, leading to Steam Next Fest and then the Early Access starts at the end of October.

Over the course of the year or so, we’ll be working on adding more maps, balancing features, [as well as] adding new features into the game that were all planned and roadmapped out, as well as listening to our community.

We want to listen to them and see what they want to see from the game, what kind of modes they want to see, what kind of modifiers they want added to the game and so on.

Speaking of modifiers, in a custom game, you can actually add modifiers to your game. So if you want to, say, make it so the androids are twice as fast, you can make them twice as fast. If you want to make it so the fires don’t get put out, you can make it so the fires don’t get put out.

There are, at the moment, a dozen modifiers in the game. We plan to add a lot more to these. Every map will have its own modifiers, too. And each one of these can be turned on individually or altogether to really inject further chaos into your gameplay with your friends and have absolute great arguments with them.

What are some things that you experienced on the solo dev journey that surprised you?

Yeah, I still get scared by the game. It still gets me.

The android does like to sneak up on me while I’m testing things out and will grab me and throw me across the room.

So every now and then that will make me jump out of my skin, and I’ve live-streamed the development of some of this game, and that has happened on the live streams, too, and people laugh at that. I’m still getting jump scared on my own game. So it does happen; you think you’ll be over it by now, but no, it still happens, and yeah, it never gets old.

Given that the Mimic can also get killed by the Android, where do they and the agent fall into the food chain?

Yeah, so as the Mimic, you have a mixed bag of a role. It isn’t as simple as “stay hidden”.

You will have to eventually pop out of your own skin and go on the hunt, but you don’t have to. You can stay stealthy and all that.

Even though you are deadly, you are also squishy, meaning that you can get killed in one hit by the android. So you have got to play a mixed bag of a stealth role because you are now a predator to some people in the maps but not to the android, placing you in the middle of the food chain here.

As the Mimic, you’re going around, doing these things, but the real sabotaging comes from the agent character who’s on the Mimic’s side. They’re the ones who can really manipulate things and really break objectives, forcing players into particular locations specifically.

I reckon there’s like a local voice chat, too, for this?

Correct! There’s proximity chat, and what’s interesting about proximity chat is that in your human form as a Mimic you talk like normal, but when you’re in mimic form, obviously, you give the game away if you could hear the person talking who’s walking around as the mimic.

Instead, what we do is, rather than outputting their audio, we output a different sound based upon the mimic’s voice. So we’ve got like a voice modifier changer which changes your voice into gargles, snarls, roars and clicks.

OH, so you don’t actually emit speech, but it just takes the input and then turns it into various sounds, meaning that my German accent won’t give me away when I play with my English-speaking friends?

Yep! And that output varies based upon your volume as well. So, if you wanted to, you can jump scare your friends by being very quiet and then screaming into your microphone! And your creature will actually roar and scream in the game behind them.

Are there any other things that you’d like to say to my readers?

So we are coming to early access on Steam and the Epic Games Store first, but we are planning a 1.0 launch on all platforms and consoles, [so,] Xbox, PlayStation and hopefully Switch in the future, but definitely Xbox and PlayStation. And there’ll also be cross-platform play!

Please make sure to check out our Discord server, our YouTube channel and other social media! Help us [by] join[ing] the game. We’ll have our early access launch in October, targeting a $5 price tag. We’ll see how it goes, but that’s where we’re targeting right now. So, a nice and cheap entry point for people to come in and play the game.

Lovely, thanks a lot for your time.

No problem, thank you.

Ryan Laley has been an absolutely phenomenal interview partner, and I would have loved to talk more to him about the game if only our schedules weren’t as packed as they were.

I’m really excited for the release of Mimic, especially due to its wide range of influences from movies that I grew up watching. I’m a huge fan of Carpenter’s The Thing, and the gameplay footage I got to see looked so incredibly great.

But I also absolutely adore the idea of walking around and jumpscaring my friends with my grunts and gargles. Having no great ways of dealing with someone you suspect outside of sacrificing them to the rogue android on the ship is also really intriguing, and I can’t wait to see how that plays out!

This post was originally published on Indiecator.

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