Inkbound Interview: Dev Talks Starship of Terror's Trinket…

Starship of Terror, the latest major update for Shiny Shoe's turn-based RPG roguelike Inkbound, is out now. Inkbound draws from the lessons Shiny Shoe learned with its 2020 hit roguelike, Monster Train, and translates them into a new experience that can be played solo or in multiplayer. The new content for the Early Access indie title includes an all-new class, additional enemies, abilities, and entirely new game modes, as well as overhauls to the core progression system.

The Best War Games spoke to Andrew Krausnick, the creative director of Shiny Shoe about the exciting updates and changes to Inkbound in the Starship of Terror update. The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Q: Please introduce yourself and describe Inkbound briefly for gamers who have yet to hear about it.

Andrew Krausnick: Absolutely! My name is Andrew Krausnick. I am the creative director here at Shiny Shoe, which means I work with design, art, and engineering, pulling together all of those disciplines into the game before you.

Inkbound, in brief, is an online co-op roguelite RPG. It has turn-based combat, but it is very fast-paced. You can interweave your turn with other players. It is probably the fastest co-op RPG that exists...I’d be curious to know if there is one that is faster. Progression is all about unlocking new options through gameplay, rather than unlocking power.

I am the mechanics guy, by and large. But the game’s story is about going into books that come to life, and you are basically solving problems. There are these forces of darkness, these inky enemies that are tearing the stories apart for their resources. You are there to protect them and fulfill objectives and quests for the original authors of these books, who are trying to put them back together. You discover some things in the process, as they are also trying to write new books in order to discover things about themselves and this world that you are in. Things have decayed from the old days—a lot of memories and stories have been lost, and you are putting them back together.

Q: Are any of Inkbound’s pre-existing classes gaining any new abilities, upgrades, or other mechanics in Starship of Terror?

A: They themselves are not getting anything new specifically; however, we do have abilities that any class can draft during your run, each with their own suite of ascensions that can modify how they work. We are adding three new ones, so there is Grasp, which allows you to pull enemies toward you and mark them for more damage. It’s great for pummeling enemies with AOE attacks you might already have. Then there’s the Smoke Bomb, which debuffs enemy damage and also does some of its own damage, and you can add new effects as you upgrade it. And then there is Quicken. We’ve done some movement revamps to the game to simplify it and make it more of a resource, and Quicken gives you some movement points and also reduces your cooldowns. It allows you to do more of what you are already doing.

On top of that, we have a new system called the trinket system, which is basically our way of trying to get back to the idea of sub-classing in this game. It’s a way to modify your starting conditions. You can unlock up to eighteen of these, and they do things like making it more likely to burn or poison or certain other effects that will show up in your run. So if you want to be a poison Magma Miner or a burn Star Captain, you can mix and match these effects to do that.

Some other trinkets will make you weaker at the start of your run, but get stronger as you go, if you think you have a good early game. There’s a lot of theory-crafting that goes into mixing and matching these various effects, which unlocks a whole bunch of new options.

Q: Clarity seems to be a big priority for this update, with quest completion icons on draft screens and the revamped movement system. Are there any other QOL changes you are looking to make in the future?

A: The short answer is very much yes. We have a pretty big list, and now you’ve put me on the spot for what’s on there [laughs]. We’ve added eating fish off the ground which is something people have wanted—otherwise, you have to pick them up to eat them. There is definitely one accessibility feature that we weren’t able to add this update—we have item rarities in the game that are color-coded, but rarely represented by words or symbols, and we want to increase color-blind accessibility there by putting more words about rarity in different places. Something else is interacting with objects by pressing a button, which will improve controller support. Also, not all the upgrades are in our collection book in-game, and we want to fit those upgrades into the collection book in the future as well.

Q: Another priority for Starship of Terror seemed to be alleviating some of the grindier elements in the game, speeding up runs, and changing the way level progression works. Can you detail some of those changes?

A: That is very much a priority. It’s something that should be very exciting to players who felt it was a little bit grindy, other players may not get it, but I am very excited about it as well. We generally felt like getting through the lore story quests took too long. It was very daunting for more casual players, so we eliminated probably half the quests that didn’t progress the story and that were just there to give you an objective to do.

We’ve also streamlined the whole experience by taking some quests that gave items, moving a lot of those items to the level-up track, and making those quests give experience. You can earn experience however you want now, so you can go on runs, win battles, take on daily challenges, and you can get access to more and more content that way, even if you aren’t super-focused on completing quests.

Also, leveling up was taking a little longer than we wanted it to. We have made some changes there since launch, but with this update, we really focused on expanding the sources of experience and the amount of experience provided, which should increase the rate of gain. It makes the game feel a lot smoother and more streamlined.

Q: Can you give us a couple of examples of what Inkbound’s new daily challenge system will look like?

A: Absolutely. The daily challenge is something I’m very excited about—we did this with Monster Train, and it’s personally the mode that I played the most in Monster Train. Every day, we have three mutators which are things that can really change the system.

You can start with random abilities. It can change the way cooldowns work: where cooldowns are reset every turn, or if you use your basic attack, it will lower your cooldowns. It can swap the enemies that spawn in battle. It can make all enemies take damage when you hit them. It can start you with certain items that synergize well, for example, one item that increases the drop rate of potions, and another that gives you special effects when potions are consumed.

We are shooting for one positive mutator, one negative mutator, and one that sort of balances it into an acceptable challenge, either positive or negative depending on how good or bad the others are. We really try to make it feel very different every day. It also randomizes the classes and trinkets you get access to. Everyone plays the same one and plays the same seed.

There is a score leader board that tracks how fast you complete the run, how much health you ended with, and those scores will be posted, so you can compare your performance to other players. While it shows you how long it takes you to complete your run, it’s purely cosmetic; you can take as long as you want to complete the run and get the highest score possible. You also get an experience bonus for the first time you run every day, so it’s a big mix of things that randomizes how the game is played.

Q: What seasonal mechanics are being introduced with Starship of Terror?

A: The way our updated ranking system works is that it goes up to rank ten, which matches what is currently live. If you were already at that high rank, you stay there, and beyond that, we’ve added ten more ranks with new mechanics. A lot of those mechanics are season-themed. Certain ones could be that slimps—these stabby, swarmy guys—are going to start showing up in other books.

We also have the mimic, which is the guardian boss of that book, which can transform and match certain class mechanics, and that actually starts showing up during the villain battles. So the increased challenge from the season for the players who are advancing through those ranks and earning those rewards come from things associated with the season and those books. The goal there is that each season we are going to be modifying those challenges and rewards to match the season’s gameplay.

Q: You mentioned slimps and the new mimic mini-boss. What other new threats will players encounter in Inkbound’s Starship of Terror?

A: The theme of the Starship of Terror—the terrors even—are these creatures that have taken over the starship. The starship has been abandoned. It was originally a zoological experiment, and the most dangerous creatures have escaped and taken control of the starship. There’s something called an Acquillian, which are these spiky creatures that as you damage it and destroy its shield it becomes vulnerable. There’s this giant thing called a Mantaloop that’s just sort of stomping around.

On top of that, there are some enemies that we were working on earlier that we just didn’t quite finish before launch, that are not as themed to the book. But there are three or four new types of enemies that will be showing up all over the game. We have biters, which are these little round things with teeth that we like, and now we have a bigger, evolved version that’s gonna start showing up. We also have warriors who use different types of weapons, and we added a couple more types of those. All sorts of new threats to mix things up for players who think they’ve seen everything in the books already.

Q: Can you recommend any fun or unexpected build combinations for players to try in their next Inkbound run?

A: We have had frostbite with Mosscloak—Mosscloak is sort of like our rogue, stealth poison build, usually—but people who have been using these new trinkets allow them to add tilt to encourage new builds in classes have had a decent bit of success with frostbite. And frostbite is a mechanic that we are sort of bringing up in this expansion—we have added some new items that enable frostbite with this expansion. So a combination of those has created an all-new build that people on Discord are trying, and they say it’s weird, but it also kind of works.

I had a really good defensive Star Captain build the other day. Where I was taking hits, I was proccing things, I was supporting my team, I couldn’t die… and I had a lot of fun with that. Another thing like our progression tweaks is that we’ve added a little subtle drop tilt, so items relevant to your build are more likely to appear. At first, it was very much flat RNG. And it’s actually expanded the build possibilities because it makes the choices more difficult. You have to ask “which one of these will push my build to the next level?” And builds can go a bit further than they can in the current live game as a result, as well.

Q: The Starship of Terror update is reworking Inkbound’s optional battle pass. What is changing, and why?

A: Overall, we are trying to keep the changes relatively subtle. One thing we learned is how many feelings people have about battle passes. At first, we figured you could earn points for rewards and put things in the store afterward, but a lot of players really wanted them to stick around. Fundamentally for us, we realized we had made assumptions looking at other games without being critical enough about them. So, we made it so the passes will stick around.

We did make an announcement that shinies—the points you can earn and buy to spend on these things—you can earn them from the pass. The goal has always been to move those forward—we don’t want to just leave those in the past forever. That said, we announced we were going to remove them from the paid version of the previous pass. And people said “Oh we bought the pass but we haven’t earned everything, and we kind of expected it to be there.” So, we rolled back and we are definitely keeping them in there.

That said, on the free track, those are going to move forward. Every season there will be a new way to earn the pass. So, something we are going to be doing this season, to avoid expectation issues with our players, we are not going to have the shinies in the pass itself. Instead, they are all on the free track. You can play the game and earn the pass just by playing the game during the season and leveling up. That is the other core change.

Overall, we have had a lot of positive feedback. The pass is high-value, you can earn the points back just by playing, so we don’t want to change things up too much for the players who are loving it, but we want to make it even more accessible. It’s all about playing the game to earn the rewards.

Q: The new offline mode is fully integrated into Inkbound’s core progression system. What were some of the challenges associated with making that happen?

A: That was a very big technical lift, and to be fair, my technical skills stop short of all these implementation challenges, but mostly they revolved around resolving playing on multiple machines, and time-stamping progress. Because at its core, the game is very much designed to be a community experience. We wanted to make sure that players who play offline can bring that progress online.

Many savvy gamers are going to say that cheating is a possibility since you aren’t logged in to our servers. We do tracking. We do not want to allow cheaters to come online. You can’t edit your files offline to say you have a thousand levels and then log on. We had to do a lot of things that relate to the information we get sent, and the verification we do when you reconnect to make sure that you aren’t cheating. And if you do, it’s going to report that to us, and we will deny the players those rewards or take other action. Keeping the integrity is very important to us—we don’t want cheaters. So that reconnect point had the biggest challenges for us, but it did not feel like an option for us to not do that.

Q: Is there anything else you would like our readers to know?

A: We’re super excited about this. We are going to have a massive set of patch notes. Progression is going to be faster. New classes. New mechanics. Everything about the game has been improved. I have been having a lot of fun with it, and it’s always a good sign when I get distracted by playing when I’m trying to fix something, and it’s like “Oh just a couple more minutes.”

[End]

Inkbound is available now on PC.

MORE: Flock Interview: Hollow Ponds Devs Detail Creature Collection, Multiplayer, and More