Innkeep! Serve Ale. Collect Rumors. Make Coin.


Innkeep is a game I've been developing on and off since the beginning of last year. The basic idea is that you are an innkeeper in a low fantasy world setting, tending to the needs of your guests, making ends meet day by day. As the days progress the difficulty will slowly ramp up, and the player will need to make choices that will effect the narrative (such as seen in games like Papers Please, or This Is The Police).

I've been keeping a development diary of my progress since the beginning, so I'll post them below. The latest one is from just this morning. Any comments/feedback is much appreciated! Given the rate of features per dev diary, I am thinking when I get to video #20 I should be able to put out some demos for people to play.

A little on the planned core game mechanics:

There are four tables in the common room. Each table has four slots. The key problem here will be who should sit next to who? Guests will be happier if they have someone to talk to and if they like that person, less if they dislike them. Happier guests will spend more. Angry guests might get into fights and break things. As the days progress you are introduced to new types of guests: Peasants. Peddlers. Merchants. Ruffians. Adventurers. Soldiers. Etc. They all have likes, dislikes, and indifferent relations to the other types, so you will have to study up in order to cleverly balance the tables to produce maximum income. Along with this is more active intervention by the player. By talking to guests and listening in on conversations the player will be able to gather rumors, secrets, quests, jokes and tales. These can be horded and deployed strategically for boosting the mood of sour guests, hence making them spend more, or for steering some likely adventurers towards treasure. If they come back alive, then more loot for you!



Introduction Video
Talking about the concept.
Developer Diary #1 February 8, 2015
Introducing the simple art to be used for early development.
Developer Diary #2 - February 22, 2015
The drinking system.
Developer Diary #3 - March 8, 2015
Zooming, scaling.
Developer Diary #4 - March 24, 2015
Pathfinding, feedback.
Developer Diary #5 - April 20, 2015
The conversation system.
Developer Diary #6 - May 03, 2015
Smoking, sitting, icons and a barmaid.
Developer Diary #7 - Jan 14, 2016
New camera system, day display, cellar GUI, kitchen and various improvements.
Developer Diary #8 - Feb 2016
New guest, the soldier. New character sprites. New drink types. New needs display system.
Developer Diary #9 - March 2016
New guest, the hedge witch. New shout system. New guest book GUI. End of day screen.
Developer Diary #10 - August 2016
Day and night phases. An in-game menu that pauses the game. A save system. A street outside the inn. A new guest chat system.


Webpage: https://innkeepgame.wordpress.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DanielOBurke
 
Last edited:
J

JTC

Guest
Hey man, love the grind. The screenshot looks cool and I like the style. I think as a person just casually browsing I'm not sure this post does a really good job of explaining how the game actually plays! Maybe if there was even the most basic of GIFs showing a key gameplay element that might let people see what's actually going on a bit more? I can appreciate it's early days however.
 
Thanks for the advice! For now I've added a paragraph into the original post which explains what I see the core game mechanics as being. This is still something I am thinking a lot about however.
 
Haha. Thanks. I think I'm really bad at drawing though. Thankfully having layers to things gives it a feeling of depth, which makes it look more visually interesting, and then shaders also prevent the colors from being too monotone. I did an article recently just showing screenshots of the process by which I made a cobblestone street. Up close in GIMP its just ugly pixels, but it came out pretty good in the end. https://innkeepgame.wordpress.com/2016/08/20/how-i-made-the-cobblestones/
 
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