Studio Profile
The 80 Days developer on burnout and reinvention
Inkle, the 80 Days developer and coffee-shop studio, on burnout and reinvention
Around a table in Scott’s All Day café near Cambridge station, staff from 80 Days developer Inkle are arguing about Mercury’s orbit. One of them thinks the planet’s elliptical path means Venus is, believe it or not, sometimes closer to our sun. The others disagree. “I’ll Google it,” the dissenter says. “Or”, chimes their colleague with a grin, “you could go back to primary school.” Everybody chuckles.
Ten seconds later the joke is forgotten and they’re back at work: four developers at four laptops working on four different games. Art and code director Joseph Humfrey – chunky headphones over his ears – is building a prototype for a rhythm-action platformer inspired by hikes in the Scottish Highlands. Narrative director Jon Ingold is tinkering with a Treasure Island “conman game”. Senior artist Laura Dilloway’s focus is the Heaven’s Vault Switch port, while designer Tom Kail is adjusting the camera for Pendragon, an Arthurian, grid-based strategy game that was a secret until today, and will probably be Inkle’s next release.
It’s at moments like this – a small team teasing each other and trying to decide where they’ll go for lunch – that some of the UK’s best narrative games come to life. The team has no office: Ingold comes to this café every day, usually sitting at the same table by the window. Members of the team flit in and out, and can largely choose their hours, taking the morning off and instead working at night if they want. “I’m like an old man,” Ingold says, “and you all come to visit me.”
This laissez-faire approach extends to the team’s record keeping. Other than its art, Inkle documents almost nothing. Design ideas, narrative beats and coding architecture are instead kept in their heads, Ingold says. “I don’t think that’s bitten us on the arse at any point. Every time we do anything, we re-evaluate it from scratch. Every time I’m writing a bit of narrative and I can’t remember what the plot was supposed to be, I read what I’ve got and make it up again. The good stuff lingers, the bad stuff gets thrown away.”
Decisions are taken quickly between sips of coffee. Still on their first cup of the day, Ingold, Humfrey and Kail thrash out a plan for the final boss of Pendragon within the space of two minutes, ending up with an extra stage to the fight. “It will change [again],” says Ingold. “In a month’s time I’ll say: ‘Here’s what we’re going to do’… In a small studio we can iterate like hell. The version of 80 Days we shipped was the seventh or eighth version.”
Their setup used to be even more relaxed, but having children changed that. “I can’t remember my life before kids,” says Ingold. “You had more energy,” replies Humfrey – “and more hair”, Ingold shoots back. Humfrey now lives with his family in Leicester, commuting into Cambridge once a month, which “doesn’t feel like enough… Before we had children we’d go to the pub and we’d just chat about game design,” he says. “Now it’s much more difficult.”
Heaven’s Vault transformed the way Inkle operated. The studio’s most ambitious game to date, it needed years of near-undivided attention. The team, then eight strong instead of the current five, had an office throughout. It was their first project without existing source material: alongside
80 Days they’d made a game based on Steve Jackson’s Sorcery books and an interactive version of Frankenstein. They poured their souls into creating a new world, with its own history, cultures and architectural styles.
It “burnt all of us out completely”, Ingold admits. For Humfrey, letting something so personal out into the wild was “draining”, and it was difficult not to take criticism to heart. “If you really care about something, you’re putting a lot of yourself into it. It’s part of yourself,” he says.
After it shipped they needed a break – or at least something less demanding. Kail ported 80
Days to the Switch. Ingold wrote for Stave Studios’ debut game Over The Alps, an Apple
“IF YOU REALLY CARE ABOUT SOMETHING,
YOU’RE PUTTING A LOT OF YOURSELF
INTO IT. IT’S A PART OF YOURSELF”
Arcade exclusive. They all devised smaller projects based on ideas new and old, and currently have five prototypes in various stages of polish. Pendragon, which Ingold is managing, is furthest down the road.
It was spawned from a digital board game Kail built in his spare time – a merging of chess and Splatoon. Players moved counters around a board, ‘painting’ coloured tiles behind them, allowing their other counters to move faster. It was a hobby horse, but Ingold and Humfrey saddled up. “We made a Faustian pact,” Ingold reminds Kail, “where I wrote you an AI so that you could actually play the game against the computer, in return for the deal that I was allowed to write a narrative for it. And you foolishly agreed.”
The simple counter game morphed into an Arthurian legend that starts as the Knights Of The Round Table disband. King Arthur sets out to defeat his villainous son Mordred, and it’s the player’s job to support him, winning battles on a procedurally generated map, and unlocking other knights to push around the board. As Pendragon’s scope grew, the team added new systems, as Kail explains: “We had this ruleset that we were really solid with from three years of lunchtime tinkering. The more I played it, the better I got – and the more I got bored of it.” Now, players flip between a diagonal moving mode where they can’t take enemy pieces, and an ‘attack’ stance that can only move up, down, left or right.
Some powerful enemies have special skills – they’ll automatically paint the squares around them to make it harder to move nearby, for example – and new characters bring their own abilities. Merlin can teleport, but to unlock him you’ll need to find his hiding spot. “He’s so lost I haven’t actually tested it yet, because I haven’t been able to find him,” Ingold says.