Inkbound Turns 2!
Hi, Inklings! I can’t believe that it’s been two years since the launch of Inkbound ! To celebrate, I thought I would dive into the vault of our internal files and unearth some special, behind-the-scenes concept art from the very first stages of development. I hope this small loo
Hi, Inklings!
I can’t believe that it’s been two years since the launch of Inkbound! To celebrate, I thought I would dive into the vault of our internal files and unearth some special, behind-the-scenes concept art from the very first stages of development.
I hope this small look offers you, our amazing players, a fresh perspective on this game that holds such a special place in my heart as it was the first game I worked on when I started at Shiny Shoe.
The Magma Miner
I’ll start off at the beginning with a closer look at one of Inkbound’s base classes: the Magma Miner.
Final Design for the Magma Miner
Like all of the base classes in Inkbound, the Magma Miner went through several design iterations before the Shiny Shoe art team landed on the perfect look that demonstrated the class's brutal strength, warrior-like abilities, and ,maybe, capture the soul of how this class feels to play with its attack style. (Fun Fact! You'll see that some of the concept sketches in this post are labeled 'Artemis' instead of 'Inkbound.' This was the old in-studio code name we used at Shiny Shoe.)
Early Design for base player class the Magma Miner
Early Concept Sketches for the Magma Miner
As you can see above, the Magma Miner’s visual language was once more focused on the classic symbols of mining. See, for example, the headlamp and goggles in the first image or the pick in the second concept sketch
Over time, however, the more armored design took shape. In the image below, you can see the design progression as the Magma Miner went from a simpler design to the one that made it into the game.
Evolution of Magma Miner Design
What do you think of the early design for the Magma Miner? Do you think that the final look successfully blended the brutal strength of the Magma Miner’s abilities with the fantastical elements of Inkbound’s world?
The Weaver
Final Design for the Weaver
Not all of the Inkbound characters had such a dramatic design transformation between each iteration. In the case of the Weaver, the basic design was similar from beginning to end. See below how the Weaver’s earlier designs had a similar design to the final choice.
Early Concept Sketches for the Weaver Aspect in Inkbound
Instead, for the Weaver, it was the powers that had the most iterations. Check out some of the amazing concepts Daniel Sarmiento Chuquisengo produced back in 2021!
Weaver Actions Concept Sketches
See all the different attacks that the Weaver had and how different they are between each sketch! I, in particular, love the levitating ability or the weaving-into-yarn sketch.
Second Weaver Actions Concept Sketches
Do you have a favorite power out of the above sketches? What about the patterns in the second concept art compilation? I think they are all so beautiful but let me know if there is one you like more!
The Mosscloak
Finally, we come to the Mosscloak. This player character who is featured front and center in Inkbound’s key art was always envisioned as a leafy, forest-looking creature as is shown in early concept sketches.
First Painted Sketch of Early Mosscloak Design
It was the Mosscloak’s weapon that made the artists go back and forth. Although they knew that the weapon would be more organic, wooden, or leaf-themed, how exactly that would manifest was not clear.
Below you’ll find a large range of weapon forms. From daggers to shurikens to wooden stakes, the Mosscloak’s signature attack was not set in stone.
Mosscloak Explorations Concept Sketches
And the colors were also in question. Although a forest-related character might bring to mind verdant tapestries, the shades of green had to be finalized. See below for the wide range of color studies the artist Luke Banke did.
Color Explorations for Mosscloak Player Aspect
All these, the form, the weapon, and the color paletter were then brought together to make the final design that you got to experience in the game. See the final design below!
Final Design for the Mosscloak
Which color palette did you like the most? Which one, the Mosscloak, the Weaver, or the Magma Miner, is your favorite one? Please let me know in the comments! I hope you’ve enjoyed this look through some of the early designs for the player characters in Inkbound! Seeing all the concept art truly highlights for me just how much work and talent the team poured into Inkbound. Thank you for being the most amazing community of Inklings an indie dev team could ever hope for.
Finally, the fun has just begun. TODAY, April 9th, I will be playing Inkbound from 12:30 PM PST to 3:00 PM PST here! Come join me and other Inkbound fans!
See you in the Atheneum! ShinyCami Community Manager at Shiny Shoe
Added new Authored Challenges feature. Authored Challenges can be accessed from the Inkwell Dive Rank interactable to the left of the voting platform in the Atheneum. A new button labeled “Authored Challenges” will appear beneath the Max Rank UI once you have achieved Rank 1 or higher in the game.
Players can select 10 different challenge runs to try. Each challenge comes with a set of mutators that augment the nature of the run, most of which are new. Most of these new mutators also can show up in the pool of mutators selected for Daily Challenges. Each challenge run upon completion will reward the player with 300 Vault Dust.
Added new Casual Rank feature. Casual Rank makes the game easier than Rank 0 and is a perfect option for players looking to clear story content or quests without too much worry. Casual Rank can be accessed from the Inkwell Dive Rank interactable to the left of the voting platform in the Atheneum. It is accessible from the rank dropdown and is available regardless of player state, including at the start of the game.
Casual Rank specifically starts the player off with more Kwillings and Glyphs, more Movement per Turn, more Max HP, and more Will Reserve. It also reduces enemy Attack and Max HP.
We have added two new draftable Bindings to the game.
We have added six new draftable Vestiges to the game. These Vestiges are not unique to any Aspect and will appear in the normal draftable pool. This is to increase the diversity of the early game by providing even more options that can show up for players.
We have added one new unlockable Trinket to the game: Boon of the Godscourt. This is to provide more gameplay experiences related to the Smite gameplay mechanic. Due to the new Trinket addition, a Trinket Key was added to the Progression Reward track.
We have refreshed the Victory Board in full with brand new quests. The new Victory Board includes six new cosmetic rewards, detailed later below.
The old Victory Board cosmetic rewards have been moved to the Cosmetic Vault. They can be found under the “Ye Olde Victory Board #3” page.
Sopwith Camel. Unlocks at Victory Board Level 18.
Nekomimi Mode. Unlocks at Victory Board Level 36.
Pink Butterfly Wings. Unlocks at Victory Board Level 54.
Mahjong Kwill (Ton). Unlocks at Victory Board Level 72.
One-Wing. Unlocks at Victory Board Level 90.
Immaterial Wings. Unlocks at Victory Board Level 108.
WIP screenshot. Contents subject to change.
The biggest new addition to Inkbound will be the Authored Challenges feature. Each Challenge provided to the player originates from some character or concept that you have encountered during your game.
There will be a number of challenges available that you can engage with, all of which will have unique modifiers to make your runs new and interesting. You’ll have to use your knowledge of the game to navigate through each one!
Challenges can be done solo or in co-op. Completion of a challenge will grant you 150 Vault Dust, which you can use in the Cosmetic Vault. We hope you try this out and have fun with it!
Do you have an idea for a cool challenge to add to the game? Let us know what you’d like to see in the comments and we will consider it for future updates!
WIP screenshot. Contents subject to change.
As is tradition, the Cosmetics found in the previous Victory Board will be found in a new page in the Cosmetic Vault. To make navigating the Cosmetic Vault easier, we are adding filters, rearranging pages, and providing additional navigation options.
We are also adding new Cosmetics to the game. These Cosmetics will be available as rewards for the Victory Board, as well as a new page in the Cosmetic Vault. We will also increase the spawn rate of Stylish Treasure. Between these changes, and the Vault Dust reward for completing Authored Challenges, we hope that all players will be able to unlock all Cosmetics by playing the game.
On the Friday stream, we showcased two of the new Cosmetic items. They are seen below.
Nekomimi Mode is a pair of cat ears you can put on your player. However, it does not belong to the Head Slot. Instead, it is a Head Effect. This allows you to pair it with existing helmets and the like. Some of the combinations, such as the way we showcased on our Friday stream, are quite fun!
It was always hard to tell when Controlled Weaving was active, so I was thrilled to make it stand out more.
This one feels great! Visually telling when the spirit bomb was ready to BLOW for maximum damage was a big upgrade.
My all-time favorite right here! Heat has changed a lot mechanically but almost every iteration was built around gaining 10 stacks or so. It was always important to keep an eye on, but now you KNOW when you’ve got a big hit ready to go
Please note that the following section contains spoilers regarding the ultimate final boss in Inkbound.
Our big bad final boss HAD to have some cool FX.
The environment FX were a lot of fun. We had to really sell that the land bits were falling through this unraveling dimension.
The head flames and glowing mask took a while to hammer out and get just right. It also had to work as a player cosmetic! Overall I’m happy with the results.
That’s all from me today! I hope you all have a wonderful day and I’ll catch you next time for more sparkles and explosions.
In game, this screen shows up in the bottom-right corner of the HUD. It displays a small subset of important game stats that you can quickly reference without having to open the more detailed Stats screen. So, first things first, let’s look at the layout of the screen:
The cubes represent objects in the hierarchy for this screen. Blue cubes represent prefabs, shared components that I can copy and paste as needed. Changes made internally to a prefab are reflected on all instances of the prefab, which is useful for visual components that are reused throughout the game. Let’s now take a look at an individual StatEntryUI component:
It’s actually quite simple: just an icon and a text label. The icon seen above is just a placeholder visual for the actual icon: the icon of the stat itself. This is where things get a bit complicated, as two invisible forces work to populate this simple UI component:
Luckily, the numeric label is just that: numeric. As such, we can configure it to not support font switching between locales, as our other text labels support. This ensures the numeric display will be identical for this component across all locales. That is useful because the amount of screen space we have on the HUD is limited, so we’d like things to be the same across locales, if possible. We only hit that checkbox for purely numeric labels, and only sometimes, as the need arises.
Looking at the high level of the visual script, we see our references to the 12 UI components that comprise the StatHudScreen, but we also see a different reference above it, one to something called StatCategoryVisualData. Let’s look at what’s going on in there…
Wow, it’s kind of complicated! This visual data object contains a lot of information on all the stats we want to visualize throughout the game, the categories they belong to, rules on when they can show, if they can only show in the HUD or if they can also show in the more detailed view, and beyond. This piece of data is referenced in multiple places in the game!
Scrolling to the bottom of the object, we see our references to the stats we want to display in the HUD. It is this list that the UI visual screen uses to determine which stats to showcase. Any designer can go in and specify the data with the tools provided in the game engine editor. This allows anybody to make changes to the visual HUD display, both here and in the detailed stats view, without having to adjust code further.
This gets to the crux of why we put the effort in to expose functionality in the editor and outside code: we want the game to be easy for designers to maintain, and we don’t want to force the designers to learn how to code just to do something as simple as reordering stats in the HUD. The core of my work is not so much making the game directly, but rather, making the tools that make the game. In other words, creating a wrapper atop the engine, a framework, with which Inkbound can be crafted.
If you made it this far without getting bored, congrats! Thanks for reading this, and thank you for playing Inkbound. I look forward to crafting more and more content for you to enjoy!
Silhouette studies for Shadow of Ruhnstone
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
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!
