Wccftech recently met with the developers at Shiny Shoe at GDC 2024 to check out their upcoming roguelike, Inkbound. What makes this title so unique is approaching a roguelike dungeon together with friends in turn-based combat, something that’s been attempted in numerous action roguelikes but turn-based combat is still a rarity in the growing genre. Sitting alongside a couple of the core developers on the project, Wccftech got an advanced look at Inkbound ahead of the 1.0 launch that just went live on Steam.
With Inkbound intended to be a social adventure, having a Hub world seemed like a no-brainer for the project. Between runs, players can jump into a shared community to show off their style and unlock with other players. The initial base of operations is set to include 20 individual players, but as the developers explained, it’s about always being able to see those you’re partied up within the hub. That twenty-player cap is only a soft cap, as the team explains that it can also be twenty individual parties of four players and well, it can be a lot to handle and might even make the lobby experience lag a bit but the support is already there. Adventuring with friends around the globe in Inkbound should also be somewhat accessible with text language support for Chinese, Japanese, German and French (only English audio at this time, though). For those who don’t want a social experience, the entire adventure can be played offline. Shiny Shoe is still working on interchanging the two modes to allow players to start a character offline and bring them online. That alone should be good news for the Steam Deck owners out there. Unfortunately, there aren’t any current plans for LAN support for players who might sync up on a plane together and will instead have to wait until they get access to the Internet to play online together.
Itemization in a roguelike is an important way to build up your character for a given run and make each playthrough feel dynamically different from the last. Each adventure in Inkbound starts with picking a class and jumping into a storybook. Each class comes with three abilities by default along with two empty slots that can be drafted and filled with additional abilities that aren’t locked to a given class. Each class also comes with its own passive. In the case of the Magma Miner which was presented during my session, their weapon slowly accumulates Heat energy by attacking enemies and after ten stacks are gained, the weapon lights on fire and the next attack deals double damage. Adding onto that are vestiges and equippable boons that each have their own set bonuses, further increasing in effectiveness for leaning into a particular playstyle. The one primary I was shown involved being a Kwilling Hoarder and gaining not only more currency in a run but also stronger passive boons based on how much cash is on hand.
So, how does a turn-based roguelike work for online play for Inkbound? Shiny Shoe has come up with a creative solution to let players all move simultaneously. Actions themselves resolve quickly and players can space out actions between each other if they so wish to do so. With battles taking place in a shared space, players will see each other running around the arena and can offer some heads-up for what sort of attack they’re planning. Since players don’t have their movement locked until taking action, each player can reposition themselves to take advantage after an enemy gets knocked back, or evade an incoming counterattack. It’s certainly a curious approach to avoiding an asynchronous turn order or forcing players to wait for their inline counterparts to come up with the next move.
We spoke briefly with Shiny Shoe to chat about their work with Inkbound and all of the work leading up to the 1.0 launch on Steam.
Can you talk about what makes Inkbound unique?
Fundamentally, it is an online roguelike with turn-based combat. You can play co-op, you can play solo, all that works. You can also play offline if you want. With 1.0, it’s even more completely offline. We’re actually doing a lot to support the Steam Deck.
Whenever you load up your session, you’re in the Athenium, which is this hub space that your character can move around in. There’s NPCs, and you can get quests. When you’re online, it’s also kind of a social experience. Even people you might not be in a party with or playing with at that given time can show up here and they can be running around completing their own quests, or you can do things like change your class and stuff like that.
How many players does it support in the hub at a given time?
We have a soft cap of 20. However, if you are partied up, we always make sure you appear in the same hub, so I think if each individual person tried to come into the same hub with three other friends, then we go up to like 40 or something like that.
Can you talk about the setting?
You’re in this storybook world where ink creates everything, and you’re made out of the ink, you’re sort of manifested, and you get to, so you’re not quite human and you get to sort of paint your face and create your character however you want. There’s all these different layers and you kind of like, rotate them, move them up and down, do standard things like swap your hair and all that stuff.
I noticed you’re adding voiceovers to Inkbound version 1.0. Is it just English dub, or are you doing full EFIGS and others?
For the voice acting, it’s only English, but the game will have all of its text localized into four other languages. We’re doing Chinese, Japanese, German, and French.
Okay. Back to Inkbound’s mechanics, how do you progress in the game?
Fundamentally you’re gonna go through a series of books, and these books are different worlds; they have different enemies, different bosses, and quests. Depending on the class you’re playing and what you’re doing, it can definitely influence what books you want to get to. The main way you play your character is, so you pick a class, and each class has three abilities that you start with. There’s a variety of ways to upgrade those. You have two empty slots that can be filled with additional drafted abilities that any class can pick up.
So, there’s a variety of ways to build your character. Classes have a class passive. In the case of the Magma Miner, as soon as I get 10 stacks of heat, I’m on fire and my next attack will do double damage. So it means that I generally want to try to draft things that hit more enemies to use that effectively.
Then you have these items that we call Vestiges that you draft and you pick here. They go up in rarities as you play through. They also have sets, so you get these set bonuses. This one is the Kwilling Hoarder set. Kwillings is our gold currency and this item gives me 10 percent more, and if I start collecting more of this set, it will give me bonuses for having those.
There’s the Bastion Shielding set, which is a defensive one, and then this one’s the Verdant set, which has to do with increasing my hit points. These early Vestiges are usually pretty simple effects that build into some basic sets. Then it goes all the way kind of up to legendary ones and giant impact and huge sets and things like that.
Each ability can be augmented three times and gives you different benefits in a variety of different ways. So, I can augment my basic attack, to be a wider area with further range, which is pretty good.
How does combat work in Inkbound?
Combat is turn based. The cool thing that we have for multiplayer is that we’re all playing simultaneously. Actions resolve very quickly, and we can sort of interleave our actions however we want. So, I can take one, you take one. There’s no turn order. You can even see your allies running around since movement is not locked in until you use your ability.
Between different battles, I have the opportunity to draft new things and get new rewards. In this case, this is an additional set of ability upgrades. So I can get slightly faster smoke bomb usage out of that.
Since Inkbound is multiplayer, how do the turns work? If one player takes their turn, does the other party have to wait until the effect resolves?
You’re basically playing exactly the same time. You wait until the effect resolves, but we have taken a lot of lessons from games like Diablo where the visual effects go later and a lot of the animations are very much backloaded, so a lot of the impact comes later.
That’s a fraction of a second before that damage number pops out. As soon as the damage number pops out, it means the effect is resolved logically. And, even though there might be some visual things still going on, you as the other player could take your turn. We also have some queuing systems in the background where within a fraction of a second, if you were to input, it’ll accept that as well. It feels very, very fluid for players and other players.
You obviously want to often slow down and coordinate. There can be effects like Marked where the next hit is gonna do bonus damage to something, where I can put that on there, you can use it, or I can put it on there and want to use it myself, so I’m like, please don’t attack this.
We have a ping system as well, so you can ping different things on the battlefield to let your allies know that you might do something.
Is there any sort of local player, not necessarily on the same PC, but also like LAN?
No, it’s purely online. We have a lot of account persistency stuff. We’re on Steam and everyone’s going to have their own Steam account because we save all your information to that.
But if two people have Steam decks and they’re on a plane, obviously you can’t get in for that.
Right, you couldn’t do that, you’d have to be off the plane. But you could take your offline characters back online and play together after you get off that plane, yeah.
Which platforms are you launching Inkbound on besides Steam?
It is just Steam for us. It’s a very PC-centric game. That said, we are adding controller support right now for just about any controller you want to plug in. Someone tried a GameCube one the other day for some reason, and it worked. It feels very natural, obviously, kind of the way I’m running around and moving my character and aiming.
The other nice thing about using a controller is because you’re lining up a lot of shots, you kind of like move slower or faster. In some ways, this is actually probably the best way to play. I’ve definitely enjoyed it.
One of the major things with 1.0 is that we are streamlining and improving our quests. At the end of the quest line, you’re going to get the new true final boss, which is new to the game as well. As you complete quests, different NPCs will start showing up in different areas.
As far as the Vestige pool goes, how many do you have access to from the start?
That’s a fantastic question. It’s been a while since I’ve counted. I want to say, we give you about, maybe like 30%? So, a lot of them, like the baseline ones that you’re going to see early on, we give you more of. We give you a lot of the commons and uncommons. I think it’s like, half the uncommons, less than half the rares.
And then as you go up towards epics and legendaries, which are also parts of the game, you don’t see quite as often until you’ve played longer. We give you a few of those and they’re very exciting to unlock because a lot of the legendaries can be built and defined in a variety of ways.
The ways to unlock them are either through doing the quest lines, so different NPCs will unlock them. The other one is through leveling up, which happens by completing quests or by playing the game. Mostly the latter. I actually have one right now I haven’t clicked on to unlock called the Unstable Effigy. So I’m collecting an orb to smite the nearest enemy. I can click that and it will unlock it for me.
Then there’s also a series of cosmetic rewards for leveling up as well. So, cosmetic rewards and then gameplay rewards.
How long is an Inkbound season going to run?
That’s something we’ve been figuring out. We ran a few during the Early Access phase of Inkbound at about three months average, and that felt a little quick to us and our players, so I think we’re going to go a little bit longer, maybe around four months. We started off in early access adding a lot of narrative elements to that. We actually got feedback that people were less interested in that. They were sort of losing the thread.
The way we were creating narrative was a lot denser than maybe other kinds of more casual seasons in other games. With 1.0, we are pushing all of our narrative into the main experience and the seasons are more about introducing new gameplay mechanics, new classes, and new characters. It’s a chance for a balance update and shift the meta. Also, the cosmetic reward tracks and the victory board all refresh as well. For us, it’s a very mechanical game. We want to give players a reason to come back and kind of re-rank up and re-level up with some hopefully satisfying rewards.
How do you address the fear of missing out for people who might not have gotten the later tracks on a given season before the next one kicks on?
We did start our Early Access for Inkbound with what was a more traditional Battle Pass, and we have completely cut those. Our community wasn’t that into them which is always good to hear about. What we still have is the victory board has a series of five to earn, and they all go into what we call a cosmetic vault, which is a treasure chest you get randomly when you beat bosses.
As you beat bosses, it will just randomly show up, and everything just goes into there. Everything’s available. Actually, there is one thing that is not available, and that is you can change your banner, have your banner up here it looks, and you earn those by earning the hardest difficulty ranks in a season.
We want the people who are really pro at the game, who really earn those ranks every season, we want to have one thing that felt pretty subtle but also was very social and very show-offy that they can feel cool about. But everything else is always available. And actually, if there’s one that you really want to get, also by leveling up in a season you get Vault Dust, which lets you go in here and pick out of the Vault something that you might want to purchase.
But you can’t buy that with real money or anything. You just start at five, leveling up and then you get something that you want to get.
When it comes to the loot pool, one issue that roguelikes suffer from is just diluting the loot pool with a lot of stuff that may not be useful to a specific build when you’re using a certain character or class. Did you find any ways to address the problem?
Our solution ended up being tilt, basically. There’s always this balance, right? You want enough randomness for the skill to overcome the randomness and enough interesting things to show up to get combinations.
Obviously, a lot of games have used things like banish systems. In our case what we’ve done is that in certain circumstances, for example in the shop, it’s a higher tilt, and in Vaults only one of the three slots has some tilt to it really. As you get further into the run, as your sets build up, you’ll start seeing a little bit more of the things that you’re building into, but there’s also still a decent bit of randomness to like give you access to potentially other things that could make your build also more interesting.
It definitely does shift over time as you unlock access to more things. That said, there’s enough tools to mitigate the randomness without giving it up entirely. Also, basically every draft has a re-roll system to it, so it’s a little like autobattlers, Teamfight Tactics, and things like that.
We kind of took their re-roll system a bit as well to give a chance for some skill-based play. Those drafts won’t ever duplicate, so if you see something, it won’t show up again. So there is an assumption of your odds getting better and better towards whatever it is you might be looking to finish out a build,
Dead Cells kind of suffered from that where the loot pool was so massive that there was a lot of lower rank stuff that you just wouldn’t want to show up in a build once you unlocked certain weapon types.
Yeah. You don’t want the game to change too much as you advance. We’ve done a lot to kind of math that out and get it feeling good. It is one of those tough questions. We’ve hit points where we were testing it out and it was too much, people were able to build exactly what they wanted to every time and that also was not that compelling, obviously.
Do you have some sort of smart system where if you’re building towards a certain thing, does it lean towards spawning that more often?
Yeah, exactly. I have this Kwilling Hoarder set. It’ll start giving me more from that set.
If you decide to just skip something from a shop and not get anything entirely, is there a bonus for doing so, or do you just miss out on spending the currency that time?
Yeah, you just miss out on spending the currency that time, but obviously you get to keep the currency to spend it later.
Can you talk about the classes in Inkbound?
We have eight different classes, and they’re all very distinct. There are some fairly streamlined ones that are easy to pick up, and there’s some very complex ones that sort of do internal combo systems. We have a class that’s all about frostbite, so as you put frostbite on things, it enhances everyone.
How many bindings can one have? Is it three at a time?
Right. Each one can have three augments at max. They’re uncommon, rare, and epic. You want to weigh the cost of upgrading something early because you’ll need that power to advance.
The way this is generally structured is that battles early on aren’t necessarily going to end your run. That’s pretty common to roguelikes. But they are going to do some damage.
When you go into a biome in the book, can you see which variant will pop up as the boss?
We don’t show you the variants for these bosses, and these variants are mostly a little more subtle. That said, once you hit rank 1, you do get to start choosing your villain, which is kind of your main overall fight in Inkbound. Those variants get a bit bigger and we introduce more of those as you rank up.
We do offer you a choice there once those variants start showing up because there’s a lot more counterplay with those where you might want to build a certain way to fight them. We want to make sure you know what you’re up against for those.
For the guardian fights, which is what we call these book-end bosses, they’re generally more things where most builds will be able to deal with it, it’s just kind of going to change how you play in that battle.
Something we also added to Inkbound during early access that I really like is we have these stats for your personal bests. If you’re playing multiplayer, it will also compare you to other people here. It will be like, this person did the most frostbite, this person did the biggest single hit, so and so did all the healing, someone picked up all the orbs, whatever it is. That’s just a fun little way to show off to the other players.
And then obviously I earn my experience points, it shows me here what I’ve earned, and then I can click these and claim my prizes. I get a new item, new Vestiges show up, et cetera.
Do you plan on having variants per class?
We’ve talked about it. I can see it being something we do. We started working on that, and it kind of reduced some clarity, but we added these trinkets. Our decision was basically, oh, let’s do the poison trinket, and that way everyone can have the poison variant, and it plugs into the randomized portion of the game.
Do you see having bosses that would be immune or take reduced damage from certain element types like fire?
That’s the kind of thing we definitely need to let people know upfront if we’re gonna do. It’s in things like the villain, where some of the modifiers can be like better or worse against those.
Usually what we’ll do is cleansing effects. So if poison decays over time, it’ll wipe it out at the end of every turn or something. Maybe you can still build into it if you really want to, but you probably shouldn’t. Daily challenges have that as well, where you’ll have certain mutators that make things way stronger in certain ways or way weaker. You’re going to want to play around to get the best score.
We don’t like doing hard counters very often, but occasionally, especially at high ranks or daily challenges, we’ll put some of those things in to encourage creative building and stuff like that.
If you see one of those hard counters in your Inkbound run, is there a way to re-roll that boss?
The bosses will be just a choice. Once those start showing up, you get offered three choices.
Do you have any plans for a seed system?
Yeah, the Daily Challenge uses a seed system already. Right now you can’t share custom ones, which is something we did do in Monster Train. People have been interested in that, so I can see it being something that we do in a future build.
And maybe just disable new unlocks and rankings.
Exactly, so we won’t be like, all right, this is the easy one, grind it forever. I think people seem to want it. It was a little bit harder to do it with this hosted model than it was with Monster Train, so we still have to figure that out. But it’s something people have asked for, and I can definitely see us doing that.
What’s the price point at launch for Inkbound?
We are $30. That’s basically it. We’ve got some cosmetic DLC available. We’re gonna put one more out at launch that has like a new outfit for all the classes and I think we haven’t quite decided what that’s gonna be, but it’s gonna be similar to the other ones.
We don’t have microtransactions anymore. We don’t have a Battle Pass anymore. We tried those out in early access; we sort of had a live service model and our community was not into it.
Do you have any difficulty or accessibility options in Inkbound?
Yes, we’ve got a handful of accessibility options, and then I mean, difficulty-wise, you start at rank 0 and it goes up to rank 20, so there’s a lot of escalating difficulty. I would say that rank 0 is pretty doable by most people. In multiplayer there’s a lot of tools available to you, so I’d say multiplayer is pretty doable. It’s a little bit easier because we want people to be able to play with a wide range of skill. By the time you hit rank 20, everything’s going to be pretty challenging, which is also important to us as a roguelike.
We definitely don’t push you too hard until you want to get to those higher ranks. Every quest in the game can be completed at rank 0, and that’s actually why we implemented this system. This will save your rank, so if you’re like, oh, I won once, and the rank system pushes you to rank 1.
If you’re like, actually, no, I just don’t want to play with that rank system, I want to play baseline, you can play through the entire narrative. You can do that new boss we added. You can do everything at rank 0.
How does the game scale depending on the number of players?
It scales hit points and enemy damage, the most simple things, basically. At one point, we tried scaling numbers of enemies and that got just out of hand because we had these little arenas and there were too many enemies. Yeah. So it’s hit points, it’s damage.
Can you pause or suspend a run in progress when playing Inkbound?
Yep, single player and multiplayer are totally saved on our servers. Anyone logs into your party, it’ll be there and it’ll just kick it back up. And we have a disconnect system. So it’ll show all the other players as disconnected and then as they log in, it’ll just kind of plug them in and you can play.
You do need everyone to be online to play to advance. Especially because the scaling is there and stuff like that. The runs are pretty short. They’re under an hour. If someone bails on you, you’re gonna wanna start a new run anyway. But you can resume it again if you all have to go.
Can you also do the suspended resume if you’re offline?
Yeah. Solo is totally resumable. It was funny because we got someone to be like, oh, I wish I could resume my run. It’s already there. We just don’t have a save function because it just happens automatically. At one point we had this little book of game tips and as you interacted with it, it would tell you things that we would put on a loading screen, but we also don’t have loading screens because it loads too quickly.
Your run saves automatically even if you exit the game. So whenever you exit, whatever state you’re in, it’s gonna drop you right back in.
How long would it take the average player if they’re playing solo to see the entire narrative of Inkbound?
That is actually something we try to make faster rather than slower. We want people to experience it no matter how casually you want to play our game.
If you want to be hardcore, we’ve got tons of unlocks and challenges to do. We’re aiming for around 30 hours. I think actually the start of 1.0 is 50. But there’s some grindy stuff in there, some randomness stuff, that we’ve been pulling back from to get it to a point where you can play the narrative in around 30 hours.
I definitely think it’s going to take some people 40, 50 hours. It will take some people on that lower end, probably 20.
Do you guys see yourselves going back to Monster Train after Inkbound?
It’s a good question. I will say we know we like card game stuff and we are inclined to make another card game, as well as continue to support Inkbound and do all sorts of cool stuff with it. That’s where we’re at on that right now. Still figuring some stuff out there.
We’re also a design-driven, creative indie studio, so we’re always thinking, what can we do that’s gonna be fresh and interesting and fun to surprise people? I will say we’re not gonna like, tread, you know, necessarily too much ground again, but I can definitely see us doing it.
Would you ever consider doing a PlayStation 5 console version of Monster Train?
Yes, I think there’s some ideas there. In the case of Monster Train, we have a publisher, so that’s more complicated for us to figure out, whereas with Inkbound, we can be like, oh, yeah, of course we’re doing this, or we’re not doing this. So I will say a little bit of that’s up to them. That would be a question I would ask them.
That kind of covers everything that comes to mind. Is there anything else you want the readers to know about Inkbound?
I think we covered a lot of it. I would generally say to people who checked us out from Early Access, we have really treated it like Early Access. So, there’s a lot of big changes in 1.0.
Everything I’ve laid out basically, like the story, much more streamlined, full voiceover, all that stuff. Controller support’s there, localization’s there, gameplay’s way more polished, and we dropped the battle pass. And it has the offline mode.
Thank you for your time.
