Inkbound is heading towards its 1,0 launch next week, and the Shiny Shoe team has moved up the original date to next Tuesday, April 9th.
The team shared a roadmap to 1.0 for their co-op RPG roguelike in late December, and they have been steadily working towards the launch by adding new features, additional content, and more. This came after the team removed all microtransactions from the game and made seasonal content less time-limited, pivoting over to be more in tune with player feedback.
Originally planned for an April 10th launch, the team announced, on April 1st, that they would be ending Early Access a day earlier than originally planned. No, it wasn't an April Fool's Day prank, but a legitimate change.Those who are already playing in early access, there's a special XP boost.
The new date announcement also came with a description of the next major update:
“We are excited to get this massive update into your hands. A new final boss, new quests, improved balance, new vestiges, new trinkets, controller support, full English voice over, and text translation into Chinese, Japanese, German, and French.”
In our interview with Shiny Shoe CEO Mark Cooke and Game Director Andrew Krausnick at GDC, the surprising result of such a move was a sense of relief, that the team could stop always thinking about monetization and think about the game, development, new features, and the player experience.
“We as a team were just honestly really unhappy that so much of the discussion about our game was about the monetization. After the early access launch, we were kind of blindsided by the negativity surrounding that. We thought, you know, it was very player friendly…” Cooke said. Krausnick added that ultimately, “we understand the feedback, obviously”.
