From 80 Days to 100: how Inkle discovered a new way of making its games

BY ALEX SPENCER

Format Android, iOS, PC, Switch

Developer/publisher Inkle

Origin UK

Release 2021

There’s no question that 2021 was the year of the time-loop game. Deathloop, Returnal, 12 Minutes and the rest, arriving just as we all found ourselves trapped in a repeat of the previous 12 months. Of all the time-repeating games, though, Overboard is the only one that can claim to be a direct result of that real-world loop. Because development of Inkle’s ‘youdunnit’ – where you play the same day over and over until you successfully get away with murder – began just as 2021 did.

“We hit January, the country went back into lockdown,” recalls Jon Ingold, game director and co-founder of Inkle. The team already worked remotely but even their occasional meetups, in the Cambridge café where we found Inkle back in E342, had been put to an end by the pandemic.

“I remember the start of the project being mired in this feeling of, god, we’ve got to do something to break this slump,” senior developer Tom Kail says. “Just, you know, get some fun back in our lives. We’d just skipped Christmas.”

Meanwhile, Inkle found itself in something of a holding pattern. Co-founder Joseph Humfrey was juggling a newborn child with coding the studio’s next game, the long-gestating ‘Highland game’. (“It’s kind of Joe’s baby,” Kail says of the project, before correcting himself: “Joe’s other baby.”) That was yet to reach a point where the rest of the team could start contributing in earnest. “There was this sense that we weren’t going to be able to release anything new and exciting for ages,” Ingold remembers. “It felt like we were stuck in this lockdown loop of not getting anywhere.”

Discussions about making a short commissioned game, with enough budget for a few weeks’ development, fizzled out in early January. But nonetheless, an idea was planted. “Well, why can’t we release something?” Ingold says. A plan quickly formed: the studio would develop a game in a week, jam-style, and put it out in the world for free. “Something that feels positive and joyful and kind of generous,” as Ingold puts it, at a time when the world had a serious deficit of all the above.