Inkbound News

[h2]Letter from the Team[/h2]

This patch fixes a number of bugs and updates balance in a variety of places. We added one new feature to the UI for multiplayer - a way for the party leader to kick players out of the party. This was requested by players a number of times to deal with situations where a player goes AFK for a long period of time. We also fixed a number of bugs, including fixing a rare issue where a player could lose progress when playing in offline mode.

Last week's buffs to Chainbreaker were good, but haven't moved the needle enough, so we're pushing some more power to his base kit. Clairvoyant and Godkeeper are also getting some light buffs.

Some book mutators aren't giving enough Kwillings/Glyphs for how punishing they can be, and a few are a bit too punishing. Several book mutator rewards are increasing, with a slight decrease for Stinging Wounds.

Book 1 Guardians are pretty comparable in difficulty, however Book 2 Nim the Lost and Janus the Malformed are currently too easy compared to the rest in Book 2. The Mimic is hitting a bit too hard in certain forms, which are getting tuned down, in addition to small tuning changes to other guardian challenge buffs.

[h2]Release Timing[/h2]

This patch will be released at approximately 12 pm Pacific (UTC-7) on April 24, 2024.

[h2]Full Patch Notes[/h2]

[h3]Magma Miner[/h3]

1. Fixed Smash uncommon augment Heatened Smash heat gain not stacking.
   
2. Fixed Burnout not reducing hp and granting omni damage per stack.
   
3. Fixed Magma Miner Rare vestige Miner's Gloves sometimes not granting omni damage.
   

[h3]Mosscloak[/h3]

1. Fixed Hunter's Dash Rare upgrade Strengthening Dash buff being removed when using non-attack bindings.
   

[h3]Clairvoyant[/h3]

1. Updated Psychic Pulse ascension Spirit Sapper. 100 damage >>> 125 damage.
   
2. Updated Telekinesis ascension Astrakinesis: "Deal 60 damage... At Full Charge, deal 160 damage." >>> "Deal 100 damage... At Full Charge, deal 175 damage."
   
3. Updated Spirit Bomb ascension Spirit Nova 150 damage >>> 175 damage.
   
4. Fixed Spirit Bomb ascension Spirit Cannon having wrong damage calculation in description.
   

[h3]Godkeeper[/h3]

1. Updated Celestial Razor 50 damage >>> 65 damage.
   

[h3]Chainbreaker[/h3]

1. Fixed Infused Fist Rare augment Virulent Fist not stacking.
   
2. Updated Runic Strike: 90 damage >>> 115 damage. Updated ascensions to match.
   
3. Updated Chi Eruption: 100 Physical damage, 100 Magic Damage >>> 115 Physical damage, 115 Magic damage.
   

[h3]Book Mutators[/h3]

1. Updated Inkshell: 6 damage resist per stack >>> 4 damage resist per stack. 175 Kwillings >>> 250 Kwillings. 2 Glyphs >>> 3 Glyphs.
   
2. Updated Inkshield: 15 damage resist per stack >>> 12 damage resist per stack. 175 Kwillings >>> 250 Kwillings. 2 Glyphs >>> 3 Glyphs.
   
3. Updated Final Chapters: 125 Kwillings >>> 150 Kwillings.
   
4. Updated Pacifism: 150 Kwillings >>> 200 Kwillings. Removed hidden 5 stack limit from Pacifism debuff.
   
5. Updated Stinging Wounds: 250 Kwillings >>> 200 Kwillings. 3 Glyphs >>> 2 Glyphs.
   

[h3]Enemies[/h3]

1. Fixed Captor challenge buff Debilitating Soul Shackle still able to let the Captor inflict regular Soul Shackle with its attack.
   
2. Fixed Lusk the Blightbag sometimes not spawning Lil'Lusks if their spawn locations were blocked.
   
3. Fixed Guardian of the Unbound key enemy sometimes attacking even while they have the stunned status effect.
   
4. Updated Argolath: 65000 HP >>> 75000 HP. Updated Argolath Tentacle: 4000 >>> 5250. Argolath has been consistently easier than Cynder and Ruhnstone, but overall does decent damage, so making it a bit beefier.
   
5. Updated Ruhnstone Guardians to not respawn on Phase 2, they will now only respawn on Phase 3. Since Ruhnstone's phases are stacked up together, getting rid of a guardian in the first phase doesn't mean much for your next few turns. Should hopefully make getting rid of Guardians more meaningful.
   
6. Updated Book 2 Nim the Lost: 28000 Max HP >>> 33000 Max HP.
   
7. Updated Book 2 Janus the Malformed: 28000 Max HP >>> 30000 Max HP. Janus Sparring Dummy 2000 Max HP >>> 3000 Max HP.
   
8. Updated Book 2 Lil' Lusk base attack from 6 >>> 5.
   
9. Updated Book 1 Janus the Malformed challenge buff Sentry Mode: +500 Max HP >>> +100 Max HP. +150 Dummy Max HP >>> +100 Dummy Max HP.
   
10. Updated Book 2 Mimic Challenge Buff Mosscloak Attuned: +20% damage >>> +12% damage. +1000 Max HP >>> +500 Max HP.
    
11. Updated Book 2 Mimic Challenge Buff Weaver Attuned: +2000 Max HP >>> +500 Max HP.
    
12. Updated Book 1 Captor Challenge Buff Debilitating Shackles: +500 Max HP >>> +100 Max HP.
    
13. Updated battles in Book 1 that were too easy or too hard compared to their labeled threat level.
    
14. Updated battles in book 2 that were slightly too hard, namely ones with the Razorshade or that spawned too many Inkstains.
    
15. Resolved issue with the Shocked status effect not triggering when a Guardian becomes phased by an attack.
    
16. Slimpe Eggs can no longer get Team Captain challenge buff. ("On turn start, Enemies gain shield equal to 10% of their max hp.").
    

[h3]Vestiges & Sets[/h3]

1. Fixed Epic vestige Necrostrain causing stutter and inflicting lots of extra poison stacks in very specific cases, such as using it with Poison Thorn and Godkeeper's Impale.
   
2. Fixed Godkeeper vestige Victor's Chits with Celestial Spear Rare augment Empowering Spear causing crit damage to be reduced to 0 after using Velocity.
   
3. Fixed Poisonblood not inflicting Hemmorhage and Toxic in certain circumstances.
   
4. Fixed Vigorous set bonus granting stacks of vigor equal the amount of damage recieved (including shield damage) instead of only granting stacks of vigor equal to HP damage recieved.
   
5. Fixed Shattered Will not granting remainder Shattered Will when you gain 10 or more Shattered Will at once.
   
6. Fixed Epic vestige Lupine Gloves not stacking.
   
7. Fixed Prey not granting buff when defeating an enemy from DoTs such as Burn or Poison.
   

[h3]UI[/h3]

1. Added user-exposed means of kicking party members out of the party via character management screen. Mouse - click on the face of the party member. Gamepad - use the HUD Details and navigate to party.
   
2. Added 'X to close' prompt after inspecting Trinket from bottom Play Bar.
   
3. Added B button hint to gamepad when inspecting a Trinket card from the bottom HUD.
   
4. Fixed issue where tooltips for Trinkets would not show if inspected from the Play Bar on gamepad.
   
5. Updated desync notification to encourage people to verify integrity of game files.
   
6. Adjusted language in gamepad radial menu for Matchmaking when in the Atheneum.
   
7. Fixed D-Pad Up navigation issues on gamepad; do not shortcut to open Party Details if in another HUD context.
   
8. Changed End Run screen gamepad shortcut for opening Party Details screen to Start button to avoid navigation issues with D-Pad Up.
   

[h3]Other Changes and Fixes[/h3]

1. Fixed a variety of Chinese and Japanese translation errors.
   
2. Fixed Rainbow Flavored text referencing Vestige Extractor when they no longer exist.
   
3. Modified collision in Inkbound Study to avoid the possibility of clipping into the book bindery.
   
4. Fixed ability to escape Argolath's arena on the bottom.
   
5. Resolved a soft-lock on gamepad when regaining application focus under certain circumstances.
   
6. Fixed a file system issue that could lead to progress loss on some systems in offline mode.
   

Hello again! I am Genevieve, a concept artist and modeler on Inkbound. I previously covered the concept for the Gardener NPC. Today I will be going through my concept process for the Shadow of Ruhnstone boss.


[h3]The Shadow’s Lore
[/h3]
A shared element for each of the 3 bosses in Inkbound is that they were once kwills that became separated from their binders due to different reasons. After being separated, each morphed into a chaotic entity that reflects conditions of how they lost their binder and the book they reside in. For the Shadow of Ruhnstone, its separation was due to an unbinding attempt gone wrong in the ruins of Ruhnstone. This resulted in an explosion, causing destruction and death. Afterwards, the separated kwill was abandoned and now looms over the silent, ancient city of Ruhnstone like a poltergeist. It has taken rubble to form a vessel to protect itself from harm. The tale of the Shadow is one of loss and abandonment.

[h3]Concepting
[/h3]
When coming up with a form for this boss, I played around with different ideas of how the Shadow affects its environment and having forms that symbolize its past. Though the Shadow is armored with rubble, it is still a small, lonely kwill. I had the idea that while the kwill controls rubble that it can launch at the player, its body could be contained in an urn-like object that symbolizes the death that took place during its separation. Another idea I had was having it surrounded by different shield-looking barriers or armor, like the kwill is trying to protect itself from the world around it. Some ideas had the kwill look more maliciously mischievous, being more of a vengeful spirit. Other ideas had the kwill looking more melancholic and lonely. I messed with the idea of having the kwill’s body be wispy hands that wind through the rubble rather than a visible white orb. While brainstorming ideas on how the kwill could control the environment, I was inspired by the mushrooms that grow in Ruhnstone and came up with the idea that it could control the rubble with something like spores, making it feel more like an infection.

Silhouette studies for Shadow of Ruhnstone

[h3]Second Round[/h3]

I shared these silhouettes with the rest of the team and they liked the silhouette on the bottom far-left. For this silhouette, I had the the idea that the kwill would not only surround itself in rubble like armor, but also make it look like a large, threatening creature to scare off adversaries. The silhouette has elements that look like bones, keeping with the theme of death that surrounds the Shadow.

Taking this silhouette, I did another round of silhouettes focusing on incorporating architectural pieces that can be found in Ruhnstone and shaping them into skull-like shapes.

The Ruhnstone environment

Some architectural shapes I messed around with were using the arches to make them look like horns and claws. I also used lined up pillars to resemble teeth. While I kept the bulging eyes from the initial silhouette, I had the idea of having magma pouring from its eyes, making it look like it is crying. Since Ruhnstone is an ancient city that goes back to the first age, it has blocks of uhn littered among the ruins. These are also incorporated into the Shadow’s threatening armor. I also added kwillspeak runes to make it feel more ancient like the city it resides in.

Initial Shadow of Ruhnstone sketches

[h3]Finalize and Color[/h3]

From feedback, different elements like the flowing magma were chosen and combined into the Shadow of Ruhnstone’s final design below. The body of the kwill is implanted in the forehead of the armor.

From here I add color. Since the body of the Shadow of Ruhnstone is made up of pieces from Ruhnstone, color is more limited but adjusting the values and tones of the stone as well as which blocks are gold can help make the boss pop from the environment and separate different elements of it’s design.

Color study for Shadow of Ruhnstone

Once the design and color is finalized, the last thing that is needed sometimes is an orthographic turnaround of what the boss would look like from different views. This is necessary if someone else is going to take on modeling the design. This page usually will list any notes for the modeler as well as texturing as you can see below with the runes and crater that can’t be clearly seen from the orthographic views.

Orthographic drawing of the Shadow of Ruhnstone

Lastly, I render out an image of the boss to be used outside of the game.

Final rendering of the Shadow of Ruhnstone

I really enjoyed concepting the Shadow of Ruhnstone because of its unfortunate backstory that is hidden behind its menacing exterior. Hope you all enjoyed seeing my thought process for creating this boss’s design!

[h2]Letter from the Team[/h2]

This patch is focused on fixing more reported problems and tweaking balance on a variety of elements of the game. Notably, both Godkeeper and Chainbreaker were buffed in various ways. The full details are below.

[h2]Release Timing[/h2]

This patch will be released at approximately 12 pm Pacific (UTC-7) on April 17, 2024.

[h2]Full Patch Notes[/h2]

[h3]Gameplay Bug Fixes[/h3]

1. Fixed Celestial Spear ascension God of Lightning spear not smiting enemies on the last turn it's on the ground.
   
2. Fixed Infused Fist ascension Finishing Fist not increasing damage based on Combo stacks.
   
3. Fixed Shadow of Ruhnstone able to gain Woozy stacks while downed.
   
4. Fixed Guardian Challenge buffs Blightlord assist and Slimpe Egg assist sometimes not spawning their units if there is no space.
   
5. Fixed the Unbound quest line being erroneously locked for certain players who played during Early Access.
   

[h3]Gameplay Balance Changes[/h3]

1. Updated Celestial Spear. 40 damage >>> 50 damage. Updated ascensions to match.
   
2. Updated Celestial Spear ascension God of Lightning: "...inflicts up to 2 Smite per turn it's on the ground." >>> "...inflicts up to 3 Smite per turn it's on the ground."
   
3. Updated Impale ascension Lightning Rod. "...Enemies hit take +40 damage from Smite until end of turn." >>> "...Enemies hit take +50 damage from Smite until end of turn."
   
4. Updated Whirlwind ascension Stormcaller: "...Smite 4 times, split between Enemies hit." >>> "...Smite 5 times, split between Enemies hit."
   
5. Updated Infused Fist: 150 damage, 80 secondary damage >>> 170 damage, 100 secondary damage.
   
6. Updated Infused Fist ascension Finishing Fist. 200 damage >>> 225 damage.
   
7. Updated Infused Fist ascension Supercharged Fist: 150 damage, 120 secondary damage >>> 175 damage, 225 secondary damage.
   
8. Updated Infused Fist Uncommon augment Virulent Fist: 10 Poison >>> 20 Poison. Uncommon >>> Rare.
   
9. Updated Infusted Fist Rare augment Follow Up Fist: Rare >>> Uncommon.
   
10. Decreased Book 2 Rhinferno attack from 18 >>> 16.
    
11. Decreased Book 1 Nim the Lost attack from 18 >>> 16. Increased HP from 7000 >>> 8000.
    
12. Increased Janus the Malformed Sparring Dummy HP from 700 >>> 1000 (book 1), 1500 >>> 2000 (book 2).
    
13. Updated Ironclap ascension Slam. 30 damage >>> 40 damage.
    
14. Updated trinket Rose of Rubies: "While above 20 max hp, defeating Minions grants 3 Omni Damage and -2 Max HP, tripled for Guardians." >>> "...3 Omni Damage and -1 Max HP..."
    

[h3]Other Changes and Fixes[/h3]

1. Fixed a variety of Chinese and Japanese translation errors.
   
2. Made run information objects visually stand out more in the Atheneum.
   
3. Fixed players losing access to cosmetics when going between offline and online modes in some circumstances.
   
4. Fixed a hidden status effect on Star Captain showing up as blank.
   

I’m Albert A. from the design crew. Today I’m here to talk about balancing Inkbound! This post will encompass how we tune enemies, vestiges, bindings, and our decision making process to when something needs to be tweaked.

[h3]Great Talks on Topic[/h3]

• A Course About Game Balance
• Slay the Spire: Metrics Driven Design and Balance
• Board Game Design Day: Balancing Mechanics for your Card Game’s Unique Power Curve
• Perfect Imbalance - Why Unbalanced Design Creates Balanced Play

[h3]Goals for Balance[/h3]

There is a misconception inherent in the word we use, ‘balance’. It suggests that the ideal way to tune a game is that all classes are played the same amount, and all choices should be equally strong and are taken at an equal rate. If you take that framework and run with it, you’ll quickly find that you’ll “balance the fun” out of a game. That’s because balancing stats and metrics is a means to an end, not the end itself.

When we iterate on balance, the decisions we’re making are grounded on a couple of high level goals

• Decreasing the amount of null decisions/Increasing the amount of compelling decisions.
  This involves a lot of looking for outlier vestiges, augments, or bindings that are too weak or too strong.
  
• Shaping the difficulty curve in a run.
  This involves tuning ‘where’ in a run you’re losing, and how difficult one battle is compared to the next. This also involves making sure certain Guardians are comparable in difficulty to another.
  
• Finding the right ‘overall’ difficulty
  This involves looking at overall winrate, but also the feeling out between making losses feel fair and wins feel adequately challenging and rewarding.
  

[h3]Challenges[/h3]

For Inkbound specifically, balance has been really hard to nail, especially with how many changes we’ve made over the course of Early Access! Months ago, there were no vestige sets, no guardian or villain challenge buffs, and movement worked entirely differently. Every major change we made moved the game significantly forward, but they also nuked our existing balance where we basically had to start from scratch.

It’s a necessary challenge, because making big swings is what Early Access is all about! But it’s a tradeoff, and with the release of 1.0, making sure we don’t blow up balance again is pretty high on our list of priorities.

Separately, a big part of our games is giving players paths to really strong, potentially game-breaking builds. That’s a deliberate choice, we love it when players find crazy combinations, and it’s a core part of our DNA, but that’s also another aspect that can make balance difficult.

And finally there’s just the sheer amount of variance there is between builds. There are 252 vestiges, 37 vestige sets, 20 trinkets, 160 Bindings (including ascensions), and 360 augments. Not to mention the various enemies, challenge buffs, book mutators, daily challenge mutators… All to say that it would be a nightmare to try to balance each potential combination of builds, and why tuning can be a lot of work! And we still have a lot more ongoing work to do in regards to balance.

[h3]Goal #1: Compelling Decisions[/h3]

Crafting interesting gameplay boils down to designing interesting decisions. Specifically we want to create is a sense of ‘tension’ between each of your decisions within a run, that ‘tension’ being a psychological force that pulls you towards a certain choice. A core part of balance is about fine-tuning those tensions like strings on a piano. When presenting a decision between three different choices, as much as possible, you should feel a pull between each of those choices. If one choice is too weak or too strong, then you lose that tension, and that decision feels a lot less interesting as a result.

More specifically, in one of our previous posts, we talked about the idea of ‘narrowness’ as a concept of defining distinct playstyles from each other, which is one of the tools with which we can build tension. With those playstyles defined, an important ongoing process is making sure multiple playstyles are viable, and no single playstyle is either too dominant or too difficult to play. On an individual level, that means tuning the stats of specific vestiges, augments, bindings, etc. whose power is at an outlier.

[h3]Goal #2: Overall Difficulty[/h3]

One way to define difficulty is the range of allowed errors that players can make to win. The harder the game, the narrower that range is. You don’t want to allow players to win no matter what, because then the gameplay decisions you make wouldn’t be meaningful or interesting. Players don’t make perfect decisions, and so you also don’t want to tune a game to only be winnable with perfect play. Imagine an FPS game where the only way to win was to have 100% shot accuracy! Instead, you want to define an allowed range of errors within gameplay because the errors are where the fun is.

In fact, there's a theory that the reason why we enjoy games is because we gravitate towards and are driven by experiences where we can expect to learn from our errors. Specifically we’re drawn towards experiences where the types of errors we encounter are small enough to be manageable and reducible, but not so small that they’re trivial. (I simplify it a lot, so I would recommend as this is a great read)

Tuning for overall difficulty is less about which builds are more viable than the next, but is about tailoring how punishing certain errors will be. If something is particularly punishing or unfair, it means that a single mistake can cost the entire run. It also means that overall difficulty is about making sure that players have the tools they need to learn from their mistakes in the run, otherwise players can feel like they lost unfairly or due to pure RNG.

Most of the errors that players make in Inkbound are either knowledge errors such as not knowing that blight damages you, or calculation errors, such as not calculating that using one Binding would deal more damage than another in a specific scenario. For more advanced players, it’s about choosing the optimal draft choices, which means the higher in rank you go the fewer viable builds there are.

For a turn-based strategy game like Inkbound, the bulk of the difficulty lies in making good decisions in drafts, as well as understanding how each individual piece of your build works and interacts with other mechanics. With the amount of information we’re giving the player, that means we want to make that information as clear as possible. Doing so helps bridge the gap between new and experienced players, which also means you have more leeway for difficulty.

Finding the ‘right overall difficulty’ really depends on how well your average player can understand the game, which itself can evolve over time (Look at most esports games on the year they released vs this year). Most tuning for overall difficulty involves updating enemy HP, damage, potion and fish drop rates, reroll costs, etc. But sometimes it also involves figuring out ways to better communicate certain mechanics and systems, like reworking an item or rephrasing a description, so that more players can learn to make good decisions in your game, and to make the ‘right overall difficulty’ an easier target to hit.

[h3]Goal #3: Shaping the Curve[/h3]

Another important thing we look at is relative difficulty, which is simply the difficulty of a combat compared to other combats. Each run has 10 combats, and the general difficulty of each combat increases as you get further in a run. The difficulty isn’t completely linear though, it spikes when you encounter a Guardian or the Villain, and the overall shape of how the difficulty changes over the course of the run is a difficulty curve.

There’s many different shapes of a run that you could make. Imagine if the difficulty of each combat was completely the same. Or, imagine if the difficulty of each combat was completely random! Can you think of any games like that? The reason why we spike the difficulty for Guardians and Villains is because we want you to have a challenging fight that you feel like you’re building up to.

We also want your decisions at certain points in the run to be influenced based on the upcoming battles that are coming up. Part of the fun of a run is being able to go ‘above curve’ or ‘below curve’, which is another way of saying, whether your build is stronger or weaker than I should be at this point in the run. For example, after the first combat, I might try to go for Ambusher which puts me ‘below curve’ in the early game, at the chance that I hit the set bonus to put me ‘above curve’ in the late game. But instead if I had the opportunity to start building into Ambusher right before the first guardian, I might rethink that decision in that circumstance and opt for another choice.

We also want to make sure that the difficulty across the same types of combats within the same place in a run are evenly balanced, which can be difficult especially for Guardians and Villains with vastly different mechanics and challenge buffs. So shaping the curve similarly involves tuning enemy stats, but instead the changes are more targeted towards more specific parts of a run.

[h3]Metrics and Analytics[/h3]

Having data is really important for making objective observations about the game. These measurements are great, because they can either validate our own feelings or feedback about gameplay elements, or they can prove that our initial hunch was wrong.

Here are some of the important metrics we look at for general balancing:

• Item Winrate/Pickrate
  
• Class Winrate/Pickrate
  
• Set Winrate/Pickrate
  
• Combat Winrate/Avg Damage Dealt
  

In general, we try to reign in any statistical outliers for any particular stat. However there’s plenty of reasons why certain metrics such as pick rate and win rate shouldn’t match up to one another.

• Complexity. Gameplay elements with high complexity require a high baseline understanding of the game, which might deter newer players from playing, or might lower the winrate of an otherwise balanced class or item.
  
  
• Narrowness. Certain items or upgrades might be bad on their own, but they could be great with other items or upgrades. These builds can be hard to pull off, but extremely strong if you do pull them off. Items that enable these builds tend to have lower pickrates on average, but higher winrates. Inversely, the less narrow an item or upgrade is, sometimes we call this ‘splash’, the more that the item’s winrate should lineup with the average winrate. If an item is being picked a lot AND the winrate is higher than average with that item, there’s a good chance that item is overtuned.
  
  
• Feel. Sometimes a class or certain build gets picked a lot just because it feels really cool to play and fulfills a gameplay fantasy really well. Other times, you can have an item that has a decently high winrate, splashes with a lot of builds, but just isn’t picked a lot because it’s not fun to play, or it doesn’t build into a mechanic that’s deep and exciting.
  

Most of the time, tuning an item, enemy, or augment is pretty straightforward. You either buff it, nerf it, or decide that its power level should be the baseline that other items or augments of that rarity should be compared to.

[h3]Pitfalls & the McNamara Fallacy[/h3]

“...the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.” - Daniel Yankelovich

Analytics and numbers don’t tell the whole tale! Sometimes you can make the numbers look right, but how you got there might have been wrong.

For example, at one point on Inkbound, winrates were too high, and the game was generally too easy, so we raised that stats of enemies and increased the number of enemies in combat. Shortly afterwards, we received a lot of feedback that the game had too many unavoidable direct attacks which felt unfair to play against. We realized that this was a result of our changes, and caused turns where you would take 50+ damage from newly spawned enemies.

Afterwards, we bumped up HP significantly more instead of attack, and we added back in more mechanics that allow you to control where the enemy was targeting. We also made a big push to increase the clarity of certain mechanics and status effects on players and enemies. The average damage taken from combat would be about the same, and the win rates became manageable, but losing feels a lot more fair than it was previously.

There’s still more work to be done, but it goes to show: Balance is much more than a number exercise, which is what makes it all the more difficult!

[h3]Feedback[/h3]

This is why ultimately, our other most important tool other than objective data is having a stream of subjective feedback. Stats and metrics can’t tell you the subjective experience of playing the game. As a designer, you might receive feedback like “This combat feels really punishing”, but then look at the data and see that the winrate is on average.
If you only value what you can measure, rather than subjective feedback, then you might miss out that the combat is spawning 3 blazing barrier channelers at once! Which as a player can legitimately be very punishing.

So, with that, thank you all for reading! If you have any feedback for us while you’re playing the game, please press f8 and submit it to us! We really value it, and we try to keep on top of any piece of feedback that comes our way.

Oh, Inkbound. I so desperately want to love you. You’re from the studio that mashed together deckbuilders and tower defence to make Monster Train, one of my favourite games ever. This time though Shiny Shoe has mixed a Hades-style isometric roguelike with turn-based tactics and made a bit of an inky mess all over the floor. An interesting mess, with one excellent idea, but I’m still about to use up a lot of virtual ink complaining about its flaws...
Read more.