Schlagwort: Game Preview

Reading Time: 8 minutes

• Releasing on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and via Xbox Game Pass
• 700-year-old manuscripts as concept art
• Inkulinati and Pentiment team up with characters available in both games

Hello Xbox community!

Today marks a monumental milestone – our medieval turn-based strategy game, Inkulinati, is leaving the Xbox Game Preview Program and you can now enjoy the full 1.0 release! To mark the occasion, we’ve got a brand-new shiny release trailer, voiced by famous bardcore musician Hildegard von Blingin’. Check it out above!

So. what is Inkulinati, you might ask? Well, it is a turn-based strategy game, where a rabbit’s bottom can be deadlier than a dog’s sword (trust me, this is not a mistake!). It is inspired by real medieval art and is entirely played on the pages of medieval manuscripts. If you’ve ever seen old medieval books with funny drawings on the sides of the pages, or even medieval memes on the internet, these hilarious doodles (called “marginalia”) were used as the basis for, well, everything in our game.

All of our characters, maps (which we call Battlefields), beasts and objects are based on these drawings made by medieval monks and scribes, sometimes called Illuminators. That’s why we say Inkulinati has been over 700 years in the making.

So, while you may come across some ridiculous shenanigans like donkeys playing trumpets with their bottoms, fish wielding knives and devils with faces instead of butts, trust me, it’s not us who came up with it – it’s actually people from the Middle Ages and Inkulinati is a tribute to their work.

In fact, to be as authentic as possible, we even consulted with a real medievalist to make sure we were using these inspirations correctly and staying true to the source material. So, as you sit back and watch your army of manuscript monkeys throw poop at enemy beasts, you can relax in the knowledge that you’re actually learning history (feel free to flex that fact in front of your history teacher!).

As I mentioned earlier, we’ve been part of the Xbox Game Preview program for just over a year now. And in that year, we’ve made a lot of changes. We added a lot of content, worked tirelessly on balancing and tweaking, squashed those pesky bugs – we’ve listened a lot to you – our community – to make Inkulinati the best it can be. And at this point, I must give a huge shout out to the wonderful Xbox community who have helped us improve along the way.

Thanks to you, we’ve added a lot of new features and ironed out the kinks you thought needed ironing out. For example, our tutorial (called the Academy) is now very different from what it was a year ago – it consists of learning the game through numerous puzzles and challenges that require you to understand the mechanics of Inkulinati in order to solve them and progress. We have added some accessibility features and reduced the shaking of the screen during certain actions to give you a better experience. Without you, Inkulinati would not be the game it is today – so thank you!

But hey, let’s talk about one of the coolest things that has ever happened to our studio – it happened during our time in the Game Preview program. We had the chance to work with the fine folks at Obsidian Entertainment and their fantastic game Pentiment!

How did this happen, you might ask? Well, during Gamescom 2022, where Inkulinati and Pentiment were both showcased on the Xbox stand as future Game Pass releases (in fact, we were literally neighbors – our gaming stations were next to each other), and we had the opportunity to discuss a collaboration for the ages – cameo appearances of our characters in both of our games. We both thought it would be a good fit, as historical accuracy and the manuscripts themselves are an important part of both titles.

One conversation led to another, and eventually we welcomed Pentiment’s main protagonist – Andreas – as a playable character in our game! (You can play as Andreas in the Journey – a single-player campaign with rogue-like elements) In return, some of our in-game characters were added to the margins of the Pentiment books! What’s cool is that it was a real collaboration – Obsidian artists recreated our art in the Pentiment style, and our art director drew Andreas himself. It was right thing to do – that way all the characters, originals and their versions from another game, are concise and fit the game they’re now part of.

For us indie game developers making our first game, it was an incredible experience. Never in our wildest dreams did we think we would have a character from a game by Obsidian Entertainment – a studio we were fans of before we started our game development journey – in our game, and our characters in theirs.

So, if you decide to play Pentiment (and you should – it’s a real labour of love and one of the most extraordinary gaming experiences out there), you might also come across some Inkulinati characters in Pentiment’s in-game books. If someone had told us that our characters would be in an Obsidian game, we would have thought it ridiculous. So, our story just proves that crazy things do happen!

Thank you so much for taking the time to read our story and I really, really hope that you will have a blast-of-a-time in our turn-based strategy. Inkulinati 1.0 is now available to play on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Windows and via Game Pass. Thank you so much for reading and good luck out there illuminating the Battlefields! Oh, and we are still planning to do some post-release updates, so feel free to join our Discord and share your feedback with us!

All the best,

Ryszard Kiełtyka

Website: LINK