Inkbound – Mooncat Studios/University Masters Project

Platform	PC, Android, IOS
Engine	Unity
Team Size	5
Duration	18 Months

Inkbound is a narrative-driven digital board game. The game is played cooperatively with players interacting with the game through an app instead of traditional controllers.

Inkbound was a game I worked on during my masters with the intention of forming a studio to release it afterwards. During my master’s we completed a demo of the game.

The demo contained over world travel, story/dialogue scenes and combat. I worked on combat for both the PC game (server)  and mobile app (client) side of the game for the majority of development and near the end I was mostly working on reworking the overworld to be more board game-like.

Combat Movement

Inkbound’s combat is turn-based and grid-based.  Players take their turns using the app which has a “tactical map view” to move their character around, a class-specific mini-game to create attack cards and then a card view to use items or attack cards.

At the start of combat the current map name and state of the tiles are sent to the app and then at the start of each turn, the active player will receive an update of any tiles that have changed.

When moving in combat tiles are highlighted on both the server and client to show where the player can move to. I originally calculated this by looping through the tiles in range but this wasn’t scalable as the radius is circular so many unnecessary tiles were being checked. It would also find tiles that were in the range but the player couldn’t move to them. To fix this I changed it to use a Breadth First Search, this could be fed the tile the player was currently on and a range and then it would check through the neighbouring tiles to only highlight tiles the player could actually reach.

Once the player has chosen a position to move to the server checks its validity, a path is calculated using A* and the character moves there.

Combat Attacking & Mini Games

There are three classes in Inkbound, the Inkweaver which is a ranged mage-like class, the Songscribe which is like a bard and the Tarot Knight. All three classes have a unique combat mini-game, I worked primarily on the mage but did work on the others as well.

The mage mini-game involves the player selecting a spell on the app and then having to draw the shape on their screen. The bard mini-game is a Guitar Hero like mini-game where the player has to press the right notes to create and song and the Tarot Knight involves a deck of cards and the player has to keep an eye on the card they want as the deck gets shuffled.

Overworld and Board Game Redesign

After a couple of team members left we decided to rescope the game and lean into the board game angle more. The biggest change from this was redesigning the overworld. Previously players choose where they were going by voting with cards, this was changed so players now had to roll dice to get movement points and the party could now split up and explore before entering the next story location. 

I also added more things to explore in the over world such as treasure chests that gave gold and mini dialogues for individual players.