It’s me, Redbeard/Brendan, writer of Inkbound, back with another Lore Post! There have been some great questions on the Inkbound Discord (shameless plug to join if you haven’t!) about the origin of Inkbound’s world and, with the full release of the game, there’s no better time to dive into the details!
The Concept
I can’t really pinpoint when the idea of “Books as Worlds” came about — it was something I’d been interested in for a while — but it definitely pre-dated even Monster Train. But, since nothing is made in a vacuum, and especially since this thing has been made and released, it’s a lot easier to retroactively find inspirations and make it look like I knew what I was doing all along!
Whether conscious or not, there were 2 main inspirations for the world of Inkbound: The Pagemaster and The Nightmare Before Christmas. For anyone who’s seen The Pagemaster, the Macauley Culkin classic of the 90’s, the connection to Inkbound should be pretty clear. But, for those who haven’t, know that books coming alive and transporting our favorite child actor into their worlds was a pretty central idea of that movie.
For the Nightmare Before Christmas, the inspiration was a bit more specific. I was always obsessed with the holiday-door woods where each door leads to a different world centered around that holiday. The doors and the worlds they could lead to were intriguing, of course, but I was really curious about the larger forest that contained all these doors and this sort of 'meta-world' that connected all of it. Where could all of these other doors lead? Were there people or beings that lived in this greater wood and took care of the doors? If Jack fell (or, I guess, trans-dimensionally transported?) into Christmastown, how the hell did he ever get out so easily?
So, the idea of a book being personified somehow, whether that was into a character or a world (or both!) was hardly a new one, but it felt like it’s such an interesting and obvious idea that could bear the weight of the ‘big thing’ we were working on creating after Monster Train.
The World
Way, way back in the olden days of 2020 when we were still working on Monster Train, we’d finally started to think about what we wanted to do next and with that came a couple of high-level ‘requirements’ for what we wanted the game world to accomplish:
We wanted something with a strong “meta” component. Something that would tie all of the individual pieces together in a compelling enough way that also created a main hub space for everyone to hang out in. In the game now, this is the Atheneum.
We wanted a world that was “infinitely” expandable. Even more specifically, a world where we could tell a wide variety of different kinds of stories and it made sense for those stories to exist within the same world.
Again, it’s easy to retroactively fit the narrative to match the outcome, but the ideas rattling around my head for “Books as Worlds” and this meta-world where they all exist seemed to lend themselves perfectly to these higher-level goals we’d set for ourselves in making whatever this new thing was going to be. So, the Atheneum and all of its Book worlds created in Ink with the help of some spiritual companion were formally conceived. All that was left was the writing…
The Writing
…and that’s the hard part. Ideas? Easy! You can come up with a hundred in just a couple of minutes if you really try for it. But fleshing out all the details of those ideas, and there are a lot of details… not so much. You’ve got to think of all the things that people will never (and rightfully should never) see! Reasons for why enemies wear specific kinds of textiles and where those textiles were made. Reasons for what kind of food people ate and why it was a huge source of conflict in this world. Reasons for why Kwills speak in that weird language that they do and why it looks the way that it does. There exists, somewhere in the dusty depths of a Google Drive folder, an actual Inkbound “Bible” that’s a few hundred pages long and details all of the inner workings of the Inkbound universe. It’s long, it’s tedious, it’s self-contradicting, and it’s wildly out of date, but having that “Bible” was crucial in making sure that the world was fleshed out enough so that when an artist asked “What does this enemy wear?”, I could respond in verbose and excruciating detail before their eyes glazed over and they regret asking in the first place.
What always held true in that “Bible”, however, were a few guiding principles around which all the other details revolved. Here’s a quick list of a few of them that I made for myself when writing the game.
A Reclusive, Mysterious Figurehead - The Inkbound would be a figure that everyone had placed their faith in but that faith was quickly fading. Basically, take the Wizard from the Wizard of Oz and make them even more fallible.
Dropping into the Unknown - Strange worlds with strange rules and strange reasons for existing. Each world in the game has a reason to exist, but I wanted them to have distinct purposes in their narrative creation. Take Alice and drop her into Wonderland over and over and over again.
Believable Character Motivations - No Black and White morals! Not a new concept by any means but something I strongly believe in when writing characters. It’s always more compelling (in my opinion) to read and write characters that have believable motivations for their actions. You may not agree with them, but you can at least have some understanding as to why they did a thing.
Kwills are Quills are Inkwills - Spiritual companions as the literal conduit for words and Ink in this world was an idea that existed from the beginning. One title we even floated around for a while was “The Inkwills” both to try and convey the importance of these Kwills (in the world, a name that comes from the shortening of Inkwill) and to communicate that this game’s story is about the Will of Ink. While the title didn’t stick around, the concept certainly did.
Starting In Media Res - Starting “in the middle of things” rather than the very beginning of the story. By the time you actually enter the story, everything has gone to Hell! The Atheneum is in ruin, most of its inhabitants are gone, and these book worlds you keep hearing about aren’t even all around to go to! You’re cleaning up the mess of other characters. But only after you make it a little messier first.
While a lot of the details changed a few (hundred) times, these guiding principles helped to have a clear ‘North Star’ (or constellation?) to direct towards when writing out lots and lots and lots of specifics that may never see the eyes of a player.
But that’s the biggest secret to writing a world - none of it’s real until you ship it! And even then, that’s why God made retconning. So, change anything and everything as much as you want until it feels right, and then probably change it some more because you can. No one will know (unless you write a Steam blog about it).
So, that’s the real short version of a small portion of how this world was made. It’s hardly the only way to do this sort of thing, but it’s a way that’s worked for me. And whether you’ve read this far because you’re interested in making your own worlds or just curious about the thought and care that goes into them, thanks for sticking around and enjoying this weird, little world that we’ve made for you to play around in!
Inkbound Patch 1.0.3
Letter from the Team
This patch fixes a number of bugs and updates balance in a variety of places. We added one new feature to the UI for multiplayer - a way for the party leader to kick players out of the party. This was requested by players a number of times to deal with situations where a player goes AFK for a long period of time. We also fixed a number of bugs, including fixing a rare issue where a player could lose progress when playing in offline mode.
Last week's buffs to Chainbreaker were good, but haven't moved the needle enough, so we're pushing some more power to his base kit. Clairvoyant and Godkeeper are also getting some light buffs.
Some book mutators aren't giving enough Kwillings/Glyphs for how punishing they can be, and a few are a bit too punishing. Several book mutator rewards are increasing, with a slight decrease for Stinging Wounds.
Book 1 Guardians are pretty comparable in difficulty, however Book 2 Nim the Lost and Janus the Malformed are currently too easy compared to the rest in Book 2. The Mimic is hitting a bit too hard in certain forms, which are getting tuned down, in addition to small tuning changes to other guardian challenge buffs.
Release Timing
This patch will be released at approximately 12 pm Pacific (UTC-7) on April 24, 2024.
Full Patch Notes
Magma Miner
Fixed Smash uncommon augment Heatened Smash heat gain not stacking.
Fixed Burnout not reducing hp and granting omni damage per stack.
Fixed Magma Miner Rare vestige Miner's Gloves sometimes not granting omni damage.
Mosscloak
Fixed Hunter's Dash Rare upgrade Strengthening Dash buff being removed when using non-attack bindings.
Fixed Captor challenge buff Debilitating Soul Shackle still able to let the Captor inflict regular Soul Shackle with its attack.
Fixed Lusk the Blightbag sometimes not spawning Lil'Lusks if their spawn locations were blocked.
Fixed Guardian of the Unbound key enemy sometimes attacking even while they have the stunned status effect.
Updated Argolath: 65000 HP >>> 75000 HP. Updated Argolath Tentacle: 4000 >>> 5250. Argolath has been consistently easier than Cynder and Ruhnstone, but overall does decent damage, so making it a bit beefier.
Updated Ruhnstone Guardians to not respawn on Phase 2, they will now only respawn on Phase 3. Since Ruhnstone's phases are stacked up together, getting rid of a guardian in the first phase doesn't mean much for your next few turns. Should hopefully make getting rid of Guardians more meaningful.
Updated Book 2 Nim the Lost: 28000 Max HP >>> 33000 Max HP.
Updated Book 2 Janus the Malformed: 28000 Max HP >>> 30000 Max HP. Janus Sparring Dummy 2000 Max HP >>> 3000 Max HP.
Updated Book 2 Lil' Lusk base attack from 6 >>> 5.
Updated Book 1 Janus the Malformed challenge buff Sentry Mode: +500 Max HP >>> +100 Max HP. +150 Dummy Max HP >>> +100 Dummy Max HP.
Updated Book 2 Mimic Challenge Buff Mosscloak Attuned: +20% damage >>> +12% damage. +1000 Max HP >>> +500 Max HP.
Updated Book 2 Mimic Challenge Buff Weaver Attuned: +2000 Max HP >>> +500 Max HP.
Updated Book 1 Captor Challenge Buff Debilitating Shackles: +500 Max HP >>> +100 Max HP.
Updated battles in Book 1 that were too easy or too hard compared to their labeled threat level.
Updated battles in book 2 that were slightly too hard, namely ones with the Razorshade or that spawned too many Inkstains.
Resolved issue with the Shocked status effect not triggering when a Guardian becomes phased by an attack.
Slimpe Eggs can no longer get Team Captain challenge buff. ("On turn start, Enemies gain shield equal to 10% of their max hp.").
Vestiges & Sets
Fixed Epic vestige Necrostrain causing stutter and inflicting lots of extra poison stacks in very specific cases, such as using it with Poison Thorn and Godkeeper's Impale.
Fixed Godkeeper vestige Victor's Chits with Celestial Spear Rare augment Empowering Spear causing crit damage to be reduced to 0 after using Velocity.
Fixed Poisonblood not inflicting Hemmorhage and Toxic in certain circumstances.
Fixed Vigorous set bonus granting stacks of vigor equal the amount of damage recieved (including shield damage) instead of only granting stacks of vigor equal to HP damage recieved.
Fixed Shattered Will not granting remainder Shattered Will when you gain 10 or more Shattered Will at once.
Fixed Epic vestige Lupine Gloves not stacking.
Fixed Prey not granting buff when defeating an enemy from DoTs such as Burn or Poison.
UI
Added user-exposed means of kicking party members out of the party via character management screen. Mouse - click on the face of the party member. Gamepad - use the HUD Details and navigate to party.
Added 'X to close' prompt after inspecting Trinket from bottom Play Bar.
Added B button hint to gamepad when inspecting a Trinket card from the bottom HUD.
Fixed issue where tooltips for Trinkets would not show if inspected from the Play Bar on gamepad.
Updated desync notification to encourage people to verify integrity of game files.
Adjusted language in gamepad radial menu for Matchmaking when in the Atheneum.
Fixed D-Pad Up navigation issues on gamepad; do not shortcut to open Party Details if in another HUD context.
Changed End Run screen gamepad shortcut for opening Party Details screen to Start button to avoid navigation issues with D-Pad Up.
Other Changes and Fixes
Fixed a variety of Chinese and Japanese translation errors.
Fixed Rainbow Flavored text referencing Vestige Extractor when they no longer exist.
Modified collision in Inkbound Study to avoid the possibility of clipping into the book bindery.
Fixed ability to escape Argolath's arena on the bottom.
Resolved a soft-lock on gamepad when regaining application focus under certain circumstances.
Fixed a file system issue that could lead to progress loss on some systems in offline mode.
Concept Art for Ruhnstone
Shadow of Ruhnstone
Hello again! I am Genevieve, a concept artist and modeler on Inkbound. I previously covered the concept for the Gardener NPC. Today I will be going through my concept process for the Shadow of Ruhnstone boss.
The Shadow’s Lore
A shared element for each of the 3 bosses in Inkbound is that they were once kwills that became separated from their binders due to different reasons. After being separated, each morphed into a chaotic entity that reflects conditions of how they lost their binder and the book they reside in. For the Shadow of Ruhnstone, its separation was due to an unbinding attempt gone wrong in the ruins of Ruhnstone. This resulted in an explosion, causing destruction and death. Afterwards, the separated kwill was abandoned and now looms over the silent, ancient city of Ruhnstone like a poltergeist. It has taken rubble to form a vessel to protect itself from harm. The tale of the Shadow is one of loss and abandonment.
Concepting
When coming up with a form for this boss, I played around with different ideas of how the Shadow affects its environment and having forms that symbolize its past. Though the Shadow is armored with rubble, it is still a small, lonely kwill. I had the idea that while the kwill controls rubble that it can launch at the player, its body could be contained in an urn-like object that symbolizes the death that took place during its separation. Another idea I had was having it surrounded by different shield-looking barriers or armor, like the kwill is trying to protect itself from the world around it. Some ideas had the kwill look more maliciously mischievous, being more of a vengeful spirit. Other ideas had the kwill looking more melancholic and lonely. I messed with the idea of having the kwill’s body be wispy hands that wind through the rubble rather than a visible white orb. While brainstorming ideas on how the kwill could control the environment, I was inspired by the mushrooms that grow in Ruhnstone and came up with the idea that it could control the rubble with something like spores, making it feel more like an infection.
Silhouette studies for Shadow of Ruhnstone
Second Round
I shared these silhouettes with the rest of the team and they liked the silhouette on the bottom far-left. For this silhouette, I had the the idea that the kwill would not only surround itself in rubble like armor, but also make it look like a large, threatening creature to scare off adversaries. The silhouette has elements that look like bones, keeping with the theme of death that surrounds the Shadow.
Taking this silhouette, I did another round of silhouettes focusing on incorporating architectural pieces that can be found in Ruhnstone and shaping them into skull-like shapes.
The Ruhnstone environment
Some architectural shapes I messed around with were using the arches to make them look like horns and claws. I also used lined up pillars to resemble teeth. While I kept the bulging eyes from the initial silhouette, I had the idea of having magma pouring from its eyes, making it look like it is crying. Since Ruhnstone is an ancient city that goes back to the first age, it has blocks of uhn littered among the ruins. These are also incorporated into the Shadow’s threatening armor. I also added kwillspeak runes to make it feel more ancient like the city it resides in.
Initial Shadow of Ruhnstone sketches
Finalize and Color
From feedback, different elements like the flowing magma were chosen and combined into the Shadow of Ruhnstone’s final design below. The body of the kwill is implanted in the forehead of the armor.
From here I add color. Since the body of the Shadow of Ruhnstone is made up of pieces from Ruhnstone, color is more limited but adjusting the values and tones of the stone as well as which blocks are gold can help make the boss pop from the environment and separate different elements of it’s design.
Color study for Shadow of Ruhnstone
Once the design and color is finalized, the last thing that is needed sometimes is an orthographic turnaround of what the boss would look like from different views. This is necessary if someone else is going to take on modeling the design. This page usually will list any notes for the modeler as well as texturing as you can see below with the runes and crater that can’t be clearly seen from the orthographic views.
Orthographic drawing of the Shadow of Ruhnstone
Lastly, I render out an image of the boss to be used outside of the game.
Final rendering of the Shadow of Ruhnstone
I really enjoyed concepting the Shadow of Ruhnstone because of its unfortunate backstory that is hidden behind its menacing exterior. Hope you all enjoyed seeing my thought process for creating this boss’s design!
Inkbound Patch 1.0.2
Letter from the Team
This patch is focused on fixing more reported problems and tweaking balance on a variety of elements of the game. Notably, both Godkeeper and Chainbreaker were buffed in various ways. The full details are below.
Release Timing
This patch will be released at approximately 12 pm Pacific (UTC-7) on April 17, 2024.
Full Patch Notes
Gameplay Bug Fixes
Fixed Celestial Spear ascension God of Lightning spear not smiting enemies on the last turn it's on the ground.
Fixed Infused Fist ascension Finishing Fist not increasing damage based on Combo stacks.
Fixed Shadow of Ruhnstone able to gain Woozy stacks while downed.
Fixed Guardian Challenge buffs Blightlord assist and Slimpe Egg assist sometimes not spawning their units if there is no space.
Fixed the Unbound quest line being erroneously locked for certain players who played during Early Access.
Updated Celestial Spear ascension God of Lightning: "...inflicts up to 2 Smite per turn it's on the ground." >>> "...inflicts up to 3 Smite per turn it's on the ground."
Updated Impale ascension Lightning Rod. "...Enemies hit take +40 damage from Smite until end of turn." >>> "...Enemies hit take +50 damage from Smite until end of turn."
Updated Whirlwind ascension Stormcaller: "...Smite 4 times, split between Enemies hit." >>> "...Smite 5 times, split between Enemies hit."
Updated trinket Rose of Rubies: "While above 20 max hp, defeating Minions grants 3 Omni Damage and -2 Max HP, tripled for Guardians." >>> "...3 Omni Damage and -1 Max HP..."
Other Changes and Fixes
Fixed a variety of Chinese and Japanese translation errors.
Made run information objects visually stand out more in the Atheneum.
Fixed players losing access to cosmetics when going between offline and online modes in some circumstances.
Fixed a hidden status effect on Star Captain showing up as blank.
All About Tuning & Balance
I’m Albert A. from the design crew. Today I’m here to talk about balancing Inkbound! This post will encompass how we tune enemies, vestiges, bindings, and our decision making process to when something needs to be tweaked.
There is a misconception inherent in the word we use, ‘balance’. It suggests that the ideal way to tune a game is that all classes are played the same amount, and all choices should be equally strong and are taken at an equal rate. If you take that framework and run with it, you’ll quickly find that you’ll “balance the fun” out of a game. That’s because balancing stats and metrics is a means to an end, not the end itself.
When we iterate on balance, the decisions we’re making are grounded on a couple of high level goals
Decreasing the amount of null decisions/Increasing the amount of compelling decisions. This involves a lot of looking for outlier vestiges, augments, or bindings that are too weak or too strong.
Shaping the difficulty curve in a run. This involves tuning ‘where’ in a run you’re losing, and how difficult one battle is compared to the next. This also involves making sure certain Guardians are comparable in difficulty to another.
Finding the right ‘overall’ difficulty This involves looking at overall winrate, but also the feeling out between making losses feel fair and wins feel adequately challenging and rewarding.
Challenges
For Inkbound specifically, balance has been really hard to nail, especially with how many changes we’ve made over the course of Early Access! Months ago, there were no vestige sets, no guardian or villain challenge buffs, and movement worked entirely differently. Every major change we made moved the game significantly forward, but they also nuked our existing balance where we basically had to start from scratch.
It’s a necessary challenge, because making big swings is what Early Access is all about! But it’s a tradeoff, and with the release of 1.0, making sure we don’t blow up balance again is pretty high on our list of priorities.
Separately, a big part of our games is giving players paths to really strong, potentially game-breaking builds. That’s a deliberate choice, we love it when players find crazy combinations, and it’s a core part of our DNA, but that’s also another aspect that can make balance difficult.
And finally there’s just the sheer amount of variance there is between builds. There are 252 vestiges, 37 vestige sets, 20 trinkets, 160 Bindings (including ascensions), and 360 augments. Not to mention the various enemies, challenge buffs, book mutators, daily challenge mutators… All to say that it would be a nightmare to try to balance each potential combination of builds, and why tuning can be a lot of work! And we still have a lot more ongoing work to do in regards to balance.
Goal #1: Compelling Decisions
Crafting interesting gameplay boils down to designing interesting decisions. Specifically we want to create is a sense of ‘tension’ between each of your decisions within a run, that ‘tension’ being a psychological force that pulls you towards a certain choice. A core part of balance is about fine-tuning those tensions like strings on a piano. When presenting a decision between three different choices, as much as possible, you should feel a pull between each of those choices. If one choice is too weak or too strong, then you lose that tension, and that decision feels a lot less interesting as a result.
More specifically, in one of our previous posts, we talked about the idea of ‘narrowness’ as a concept of defining distinct playstyles from each other, which is one of the tools with which we can build tension. With those playstyles defined, an important ongoing process is making sure multiple playstyles are viable, and no single playstyle is either too dominant or too difficult to play. On an individual level, that means tuning the stats of specific vestiges, augments, bindings, etc. whose power is at an outlier.
Goal #2: Overall Difficulty
One way to define difficulty is the range of allowed errors that players can make to win. The harder the game, the narrower that range is. You don’t want to allow players to win no matter what, because then the gameplay decisions you make wouldn’t be meaningful or interesting. Players don’t make perfect decisions, and so you also don’t want to tune a game to only be winnable with perfect play. Imagine an FPS game where the only way to win was to have 100% shot accuracy! Instead, you want to define an allowed range of errors within gameplay because the errors are where the fun is.
In fact, there's a theory that the reason why we enjoy games is because we gravitate towards and are driven by experiences where we can expect to learn from our errors. Specifically we’re drawn towards experiences where the types of errors we encounter are small enough to be manageable and reducible, but not so small that they’re trivial. (I simplify it a lot, so I would recommend as this is a great read)
Tuning for overall difficulty is less about which builds are more viable than the next, but is about tailoring how punishing certain errors will be. If something is particularly punishing or unfair, it means that a single mistake can cost the entire run. It also means that overall difficulty is about making sure that players have the tools they need to learn from their mistakes in the run, otherwise players can feel like they lost unfairly or due to pure RNG.
Most of the errors that players make in Inkbound are either knowledge errors such as not knowing that blight damages you, or calculation errors, such as not calculating that using one Binding would deal more damage than another in a specific scenario. For more advanced players, it’s about choosing the optimal draft choices, which means the higher in rank you go the fewer viable builds there are.
For a turn-based strategy game like Inkbound, the bulk of the difficulty lies in making good decisions in drafts, as well as understanding how each individual piece of your build works and interacts with other mechanics. With the amount of information we’re giving the player, that means we want to make that information as clear as possible. Doing so helps bridge the gap between new and experienced players, which also means you have more leeway for difficulty.
Finding the ‘right overall difficulty’ really depends on how well your average player can understand the game, which itself can evolve over time (Look at most esports games on the year they released vs this year). Most tuning for overall difficulty involves updating enemy HP, damage, potion and fish drop rates, reroll costs, etc. But sometimes it also involves figuring out ways to better communicate certain mechanics and systems, like reworking an item or rephrasing a description, so that more players can learn to make good decisions in your game, and to make the ‘right overall difficulty’ an easier target to hit.
Goal #3: Shaping the Curve
Another important thing we look at is relative difficulty, which is simply the difficulty of a combat compared to other combats. Each run has 10 combats, and the general difficulty of each combat increases as you get further in a run. The difficulty isn’t completely linear though, it spikes when you encounter a Guardian or the Villain, and the overall shape of how the difficulty changes over the course of the run is a difficulty curve.
There’s many different shapes of a run that you could make. Imagine if the difficulty of each combat was completely the same. Or, imagine if the difficulty of each combat was completely random! Can you think of any games like that? The reason why we spike the difficulty for Guardians and Villains is because we want you to have a challenging fight that you feel like you’re building up to.
We also want your decisions at certain points in the run to be influenced based on the upcoming battles that are coming up. Part of the fun of a run is being able to go ‘above curve’ or ‘below curve’, which is another way of saying, whether your build is stronger or weaker than I should be at this point in the run. For example, after the first combat, I might try to go for Ambusher which puts me ‘below curve’ in the early game, at the chance that I hit the set bonus to put me ‘above curve’ in the late game. But instead if I had the opportunity to start building into Ambusher right before the first guardian, I might rethink that decision in that circumstance and opt for another choice.
We also want to make sure that the difficulty across the same types of combats within the same place in a run are evenly balanced, which can be difficult especially for Guardians and Villains with vastly different mechanics and challenge buffs. So shaping the curve similarly involves tuning enemy stats, but instead the changes are more targeted towards more specific parts of a run.
Metrics and Analytics
Having data is really important for making objective observations about the game. These measurements are great, because they can either validate our own feelings or feedback about gameplay elements, or they can prove that our initial hunch was wrong.
Here are some of the important metrics we look at for general balancing:
Item Winrate/Pickrate
Class Winrate/Pickrate
Set Winrate/Pickrate
Combat Winrate/Avg Damage Dealt
In general, we try to reign in any statistical outliers for any particular stat. However there’s plenty of reasons why certain metrics such as pick rate and win rate shouldn’t match up to one another.
Complexity. Gameplay elements with high complexity require a high baseline understanding of the game, which might deter newer players from playing, or might lower the winrate of an otherwise balanced class or item.
Narrowness. Certain items or upgrades might be bad on their own, but they could be great with other items or upgrades. These builds can be hard to pull off, but extremely strong if you do pull them off. Items that enable these builds tend to have lower pickrates on average, but higher winrates. Inversely, the less narrow an item or upgrade is, sometimes we call this ‘splash’, the more that the item’s winrate should lineup with the average winrate. If an item is being picked a lot AND the winrate is higher than average with that item, there’s a good chance that item is overtuned.
Feel. Sometimes a class or certain build gets picked a lot just because it feels really cool to play and fulfills a gameplay fantasy really well. Other times, you can have an item that has a decently high winrate, splashes with a lot of builds, but just isn’t picked a lot because it’s not fun to play, or it doesn’t build into a mechanic that’s deep and exciting.
Most of the time, tuning an item, enemy, or augment is pretty straightforward. You either buff it, nerf it, or decide that its power level should be the baseline that other items or augments of that rarity should be compared to.
Pitfalls & the McNamara Fallacy
“...the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.” - Daniel Yankelovich
Analytics and numbers don’t tell the whole tale! Sometimes you can make the numbers look right, but how you got there might have been wrong.
For example, at one point on Inkbound, winrates were too high, and the game was generally too easy, so we raised that stats of enemies and increased the number of enemies in combat. Shortly afterwards, we received a lot of feedback that the game had too many unavoidable direct attacks which felt unfair to play against. We realized that this was a result of our changes, and caused turns where you would take 50+ damage from newly spawned enemies.
Afterwards, we bumped up HP significantly more instead of attack, and we added back in more mechanics that allow you to control where the enemy was targeting. We also made a big push to increase the clarity of certain mechanics and status effects on players and enemies. The average damage taken from combat would be about the same, and the win rates became manageable, but losing feels a lot more fair than it was previously.
There’s still more work to be done, but it goes to show: Balance is much more than a number exercise, which is what makes it all the more difficult!
Feedback
This is why ultimately, our other most important tool other than objective data is having a stream of subjective feedback. Stats and metrics can’t tell you the subjective experience of playing the game. As a designer, you might receive feedback like “This combat feels really punishing”, but then look at the data and see that the winrate is on average. If you only value what you can measure, rather than subjective feedback, then you might miss out that the combat is spawning 3 blazing barrier channelers at once! Which as a player can legitimately be very punishing.
So, with that, thank you all for reading! If you have any feedback for us while you’re playing the game, please press f8 and submit it to us! We really value it, and we try to keep on top of any piece of feedback that comes our way.
Inkbound Patch 1.0.1
Letter from the Team
We are happy to see so many people enjoying the game! Thank you for playing.
This first patch after launching 1.0 is focused primarily on bug fixes with a few balance changes. We will continue to fix as many bugs as we can. We expect to patch again next week.
Release Timing
This patch will be released at approximately 12 pm Pacific (UTC-7) on April 12, 2024.
Full Patch Notes
Gameplay Bug Fixes
Fixed Tuhning Guardians using a discontinued mechanic that grants +25% damage buff whenever a player uses a binding every other turn. Increased base attack from 7 >>> 9.
Fixed Unbound tentacles able to spawn multiple in the same spot. Fixed tentacles re-gaining inkshield every 3 turns.
Fixed certain book mutators no longer affecting player after dying and being revived in multiplayer.
Fixed Mosscloak Legendary vestige The Emerald Leaf increasing Shuriken max stacks by 10 instead of to 10.
Fixed Incendiary ascension Wildfire not properly inflicting half burn stacks to all other Enemies.
Fixed Uncommon vestige Barbed Bones granting extra stacks of Spiked while you have the Ambusher set bonus active.
Fixed Quicken ascension Expedite reducing highest Binding cooldown to 0 instead of random Binding cooldown.
Fixed Chi Eruption Rare augment Overflowing Eruption status effect staying around in the next turn even after cost discount has expired.
Fixed Rare vestige Shocking Corecap limiting triggers for number of enemies crit instead of number of times you used a Binding with a critical charge.
Fixed Common vestige Stationgrade Klaxon not stacking.
Fixed Constrict ascensions not properly being affected by crit chance by Uncommon augment Critical Constrict.
Fixed Weaver vestige Rare Faded Mandela not triggering while you have Weaver Epic vestige Strings of Fate and Constrict ascension Rope Burn.
Fixed Thread ascension Tether not removing Threaded when targeting both threaded and un-threaded enemies.
Fixed Trinket Sanguinity of Witt increasing chance but not guaranteeing seeing Cleave in Binding draft.
Gameplay Balance Changes
Updated Frostfire set from 3, 6 >>> 4, 7.
Updated Warden set from 2,4,6 >>> 2,4,7.
Updated Reaver 8 "+125 crit damage. On Critting, +25 crit damage until end of turn." >>> "+120 crit damage. On Critting, +15 crit damage until lend of turn."
Adjust slightly enemy appearance rate on some battles that were too hard and one battle that was too easy.
Updated Trinket Marker of the Unbound. "...After using a Binding in Blight 5 times, gain 6 Omni damage." >>> "...After using a Binding in Blight 5 times, gain 4 Omni damage."
Updated Chain Lightning Uncommon augment Empowering Lightning: "+25 Omni Damage until an Attack Binding is used." >>> "+15 Omni Damage for the rest the turn."
Vestige Trade Up mutator will no longer swap with other class's class-specific vestiges.
Updated Bounty of Sentient beings to not apply Bounty onto Villains or Guardians.
Other Changes and Fixes
Improved the Chinese translation in various places.
Fixed some minor text bugs in other languages.
Fixed typo in Epic vestige "Melting Sprout" >>> "Melting Spout".
Fixed Trinket Talons of Cyn referring to "Poison Cloud" binding instead of "Poison Vapor".
Fixed bug where tooltip would not appear on gamepad for Max HP entry in Stat Details screen on entry to the screen from the Radial Menu screen.
Fixed Redeem Code button from being disabled in Atheneum in some circumstances.
Adjusted default selectable in Logbook Quests on gamepad: prioritize going to tracking buttons over reward items, when available.
Fixed issue where the stats tutorial could trigger upon returning to the Atheneum and be unable to be dismissed.
Fixed The Stigmatist having the wrong display name in a specific context.
Adjusted tutorial UI on gamepad to not show LB/RB helper icons in bottom HUD until a class is selected.
Fixed players rarely seeming to get randomly renamed when playing online.
Inkbound 1.0 is out now with the Rise of the Unbound content update!
Welcome to our 1.0 update, Rise of the Unbound! This update to Inkbound includes new quest lines, a new final boss, many balance changes, new items, full controller support, full English voice over, localization into Chinese/Japanese/French/German and a lot more. If you’re interested in all the details, read on!
New Features
New Final Boss: The Unbound
Waiting for you beneath the inky expanse, the entity behind the Unravelling is gathering in strength. But in order to reach it, you must dive further than you ever have before. Are you prepared, Needless?
New Quests
Unravel the final mysteries of the Atheneum and its reclusive Inkbound as you embark on the final chapter of the Inkbound story to defeat the Unbound and decide the fate of the Atheneum once and for all.
Vestige Mastery and Vestige Lore
When you win a run with a Vestige equipped, it will become “mastered”. We indicate this in a variety of places in the UI. Upon mastering a Vestige you can read some additional lore about it in the Logbook Collection, fleshing out the story and world.
Can you master them all?
Challenge Buffs on Villains and Guardians
To increase run variety we’ve implemented Challenge Buffs on both Villains and Guardians (book bosses). These modifiers change the gameplay in a variety of different ways. At higher Ranks, your choice of Villain also tells you what the Challenge Buff will be, giving you a gameplay reason to decide to go for one Villain or another.
New Vestiges and Vestige Sets
There are 25 new Vestiges added into the mix, bringing the pool of Vestiges up to 242. We’ve also added 5 new Vestige Sets to a total of 37 vestige sets. Fun fact: that’s over 8 trillion potential Vestige combinations!
New Trinkets
There are 2 new trinkets that have been added, bringing the total up to 20. In addition, several trinkets have been reworked to make them clearer to read and more interesting to use.
Full Controller Support
We’ve implemented support for controllers across the entirety of the game. We support button icons for Steam Deck, Xbox Series, PlayStation DualSense, and Switch Pro controllers. It was challenging to provide controller-based access to all of the UI information in the game but it’s all accessible.
Keyboard Proximity Interact
Prefer to use a keyboard instead of clicking with the mouse? We’ve added the ability to interact with objects in Inkbound with a press of a key. This feature was added for controller support initially but we extended it to the keyboard as well. In case you don’t like seeing these hint prompts, you can disable them in the settings.
Improved Steam Deck Support
Of course full controller support will improve the experience on the Steam Deck tremendously. On top of that, we’ve also implemented support for the virtual keyboard where needed, and made a few other Deck-specific tweaks.
Full English VO
In Early Access part of our NPC dialogue was voiced. Now, at 1.0, all of it is. We hope you’ll enjoy the work of both our returning and new actors.
Localization into Chinese, Japanese, French, and German
Inkbound has been fully localized into these four new languages. You can continue to play in English if you wish, or switch to one of the new languages to give it a shot! If you have any bug reports for the localization you would like to share with us, please join us in Discord or press F8 to report them in-game.
Story Cutscenes
In a few places in the game we’ve upped the polish level by implementing animated cutscenes. The screenshot below is from the start of the game. And yes, you can skip them if you don’t want to watch.
Added Augments to Logbook Collection
Ever wanted to know what all the Augments are for a Binding? Now you can see them all in one place and plan out your build.
More Steam Achievements
We added 11 new Achievements for you Achievement hunters out there bringing the total to 39.
Reworked Systems and Quality of Life
Major Balance Rework
Our goal with balance changes was to make sure the first book wasn't a 'free win' - your build has to start to come together at least a little, and at the same time we added a lot more ways for builds to grow and develop within Book 1. Book 2 and beyond have felt too easy in the live game and we simply wanted those to have increased challenges. In general as we increased the challenge it also pushed us to make things more fair, certain unfair feeling challenge buffs have been cut, and we've generally rebalanced the weight of a variety of player power sources against each other to feel more like even contributions. On top of these changes we've wanted to bring down slightly the total amount of units so that battles can be clearer and cleaner and we've made some of those changes as well. Of course all balance is a process and we will definitely be watching closely in the coming weeks to continue to fine tune these numbers.
Quest Progression Simplified
All existing quests have been reworked and, in some cases, simplified to reduce RNG dependencies and simplify progression. Various pieces of content that are locked behind quests (e.g. the Star Captain Aspect) have been given special attention both to make it clear how to unlock as well as to significantly reduce the amount of time to unlock it.
Run Types Simplified
To simplify starting a run, we merged the concept of an Unranked Run and a Ranked Run into a single run start option. Daily Challenge continues to be a separate option.
Improved Rank Changing and Daily Challenge Detail UI
After the last note, you might be wondering how you can play an Unranked run now. Well, never fear, it’s still possible in a new and improved UI accessible in the Atheneum. From this UI you can lower your Rank if you wish via a handy drop-down and can review the details of the Rank before committing to starting a run.
We also applied the same treatment to the Daily Challenge, giving it a dedicated UI screen for reviewing information about the current Challenge.
Refreshed Victory Board
We’ve fully refreshed the Victory Board with 108 new objectives and new cosmetics to unlock by completing them.
(The cosmetic rewards from the prior Victory Board have been moved into the Cosmetic Vault.)
Improved Display of Bindings in Logbook Collection
We reorganized the UI in the Logbook’s Bindings section to make it easier to see which Ascenions are related to which Binding.
Change Your Character Name
Name yourself “asdf” before realizing that your name would be publicly visible when playing online? Just me? Well you can change it yourself now in the Character Customization screen.
Improved Support for Various Monitor Aspect Ratios
In Early Access we had good support for 16:9 and 16:10. Now, we’ve made polish improvements to wider aspects like 21:9, and have implemented numerous bug fixes for closer-to-square aspect ratios like 4:3 and 5:4.
Punchier Audio and Visual Effects
Interspersed throughout the game we’ve added new visual effects and new audio to juice up and improve the game feel.
Rearrange Vestige Bar
You can now rearrange your Vestige bar by dragging and dropping Vestiges into different slots to swap their order.
... And More!
Beyond the larger features we have made hundreds of small changes to improve balance, fix bugs, and generally polish the overall experience. We are super excited to be releasing this major update and look forward to hearing your feedback!
Want to see the detailed list of changes? You can view those here.
A look back and to the future of Inkbound with the Creative Director
Hello Inkbound fans!
If you’ve visited our weekly streams you’re probably well aware of who I am (and if you haven’t stopped by our streams, you should!). That said, my name is Andrew Krausnick and I’m the Creative Director here at Shiny Shoe. What that means is I’m generally responsible for developing with our team a unified creative vision that we are all working towards, and that as we create, playtest, and gather feedback on our games that we update that vision and continue to work towards creating the best possible games for you all to play.
In this blog post, as we head towards our upcoming 1.0 launch, I wanted to spend a little time looking at where we started, where we are now, and where we’re headed. Where we started
Inkbound as a project was born out of a desire to create a new type of roguelike that married multiplayer, tactics, and creating incredibly broken builds. Of course that’s no small task, and of all projects I’ve worked on this has been the one that has faced the most iteration and challenges. Some that we expected and many we didn’t!
For us as a studio it was our first multiplayer game, our first time trying out alternative monetization ideas, and as far as we know the combat system is one of a kind.
Some of our initial ideas paid off - I’m very pleased with how our combat system can feel fast and reactive in multiplayer. And some of those ideas had to go (nobody seems sad that we no longer have a battle pass). Other ideas came to us along the way, as methods to further enhance core ideas. Such as the impact and appearance of Vestige Sets in the most recent update.
One of my favorite things to do at launches is to look back at some of the earliest screenshots of a project. Here are a few I pulled out of the depths of my hard drive (it’s like looking at baby pictures - a little ugly and a little cute?)
The oldest screenshot on my hard drive. The original ‘biter’ is about to chomp.
A real world exists! Also we had equipment with abilities on it. Also an inventory that was persistent (between runs!). Trying out a lot of ideas here. Chat is 20% of the screen.
The Inklings exist! Also we have resource bars, experience points, and abilities. We had arcing attack lines from enemies in real space at this point.
The first figments, also the combat arena works at this point and enemy variety is ramping up.
The first augment drafts. They had bonus effects at the time! Everyone just always chose the bonus effect ones though. More of a level up system and less mix and match.
Where we are now
We’ve grown a great community, iterated heavily, added languages, controller support, and much more with this upcoming update. The narrative is voiced and there’s a payoff at the end. There’s a ton of balance changes that will make the game more engaging and rewarding than ever, with more tough choices and big wins (and close losses!). In short, our launch brings basically a whole new game. The launch is incredibly exciting and the amount of changes and polish is staggering - I genuinely can’t wait until it’s in all of your hands.
What we see in the future!
And of course looking at the above screenshots I can’t help but wonder if by the time we’re at 2.0 if the current game will look just as old. So what’s next? To a large degree that’s up to all of you and all of our new fans! We look forward to hearing from you all on what you’d like to see.
Of course we have a few aspects we’ve been cooking up, a variety of new Bindings, as well as a range of discussions about how we can expand the game even further. What game modes could we introduce? What about more unique book effects, or even books themselves? Let us know in the comments what you’d love to see and we’ll hopefully be talking about all of that very soon!
Inkbound 1.0 Release Now on April 9th
Hi everyone!
It might be April 1st but we have some very real and important news to share with you today. We are moving our release date up by one day from April 10th to April 9th! In addition, between now and April 9th, we’ve enabled an XP boost in the current Early Access version of the game.
We are excited to get this massive update into your hands. A new final boss, new quests, improved balance, new vestiges, new trinkets, controller support, full English voice over, and text translation into Chinese, Japanese, German, and French.
We are patching the game today to add the XP boost and to update the countdown timer, which now reflects our new launch date.
We are looking forward to seeing you in the world of Inkbound on April 9th!
Gods & Relics - Minor Update
Letter from the Team
This is our last expected updated before 1.0. The update will be released approximately on March 6, 2024 at 10 am PT (GMT-8).
We've got a ton of new stuff coming in 1.0, so please look forward to that in April.
Changes
Added countdown timer to 1.0 on the main menu.
Fixed changing rank not getting applied to the run in offline mode.
Resolved issue with Heart of a Hero not firing if combat ends while the player is dead.
