Jon Ingold needs no introduction; he has been writing high-quality video games for years now and has amassed quite the back catalogue. I was thrilled to learn that he was attending this year’s AdventureX, in which Jon has been a strong supporter of for some years now, and the love he has for the event is clear to see.
Jon very kindly spared me some time at the weekend to chat with me about AdventureX, how he approaches his writing, the shift from maths teacher to developer and much more.
How has AdventureX been for you so far?
AdventureX is brilliant – exhausting, but brilliant. There are far more people here than you could possibly speak to, but we try anyway. We’ve done a talk – we’ve sold out of our books and boxed games – we’ve had loads of people play the demo of Expelled! – and a few play the secret demo of the new thing too. It’s been great.
What is it about AdventureX that makes it such a special event for you and others?
I’ve been saying to a few people: AdventureX is the only games conference I go to where everyone you meet definitely cares about the same stuff in your game that I do. So when someone’s playing your build – or when you’re just catching up about games in general – everyone here is on the same page. That shared interest creates this amazing sense of community.
I’ve been coming to AdventureX since it was 30 people in a single classroom, and even as it grows and gets more exciting, it hasn’t lost that feel of a group of friends, and I love that. We all need that positivity.
You hosted a talk here on from inspiration to storyline, in which you mentioned how you use your inspirations for your writing and how others could do the same. In that regard, what inspired you to write Overboard?
Overboard! is a classic example of how inspiration never goes in a straight line. It was lockdown, January 2020. Our last game, Pendragon, had underperformed, and our next game, A Highland Song, wasn’t going to be ready for at least a year (it eventually came out in 2023). Money was tight, and we were feeling miserable, and we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to just release something – anything – as a total surprise, for people not to think about and get hyped about and all that but to just play, now, today, right away?’
Meanwhile, I’d been listening to an audio drama version of Murder on the Orient Express and thinking about how there weren’t many “golden age” crime fiction games. What makes a good Golden Age crime story? It’s pretty cosy. The dead guy is a bad person; the murderer is fairly sympathetic. There’s a love story. The detective is quite a character. Everyone is posh, so we don’t mind too much if they suffer. There’s always a happy ending.
Meanwhile, I was thinking about an old text adventure I wrote in 2005, in which you play as a detective trying to pin a crime on someone who didn’t do it. That game worked by letting you do pretty much anything you wanted to, so players would be constantly surprised by just how evil they could be.
Those three things came together in a simple idea – you pushed your husband off a boat, and you have 8 hours to get away with it. A tiny scope – limited visual novel art with few backgrounds – great characters, great conversation – lots of story consequences. This is classic Inkle design in a tight package. I wrote the first run of the script in a week; it was raw (and buggy) and incomplete, but it was enough to show to people (with coloured boxes standing in for all the artwork), and people played it – and then wanted another go.
You co-founded inkle Studios with Joseph Humfrey back in 2011. What made you want to come from the world of a mathematics teacher to running a video game company?
I’ve always been a writer, and I’ve always been a writer of games, way back to when I was a kid playing text adventures. I used to design the games in notebooks because our computer had no programming languages. Then the internet came along and gave me options to write and distribute games, and that’s how I started.
I met Joe when we were working at Sony PlayStation in the late 2000s. I remember we started designing narrative games within about ten minutes of being introduced. A couple of years later, the iPad came out, and it seemed like a great time to try out our ideas. So, to be honest, the teaching thing was the strange bit. But it’s great training for doing talks!
Since then the studio has gone from strength to strength, releasing strong narrative video games. It’s leaving a lasting impression on the industry. But was that always the goal?
You can’t really plan for success. You can only aim to do the best you can. We decided early that we wanted to make things that were good – that we thought were good – rather than to chase market trends. Games are always changing, and you’re always behind, and anyway, we like designing, we like telling stories, and we like coming up with ideas. So even when we steal a design element from somewhere – like using visual novel stylings for Expelled! – we end up fundamentally changing the design so much that the result is totally different anyway.
We call A Highland Song a platformer, but it’s nothing like any platformer I’ve ever played. Our next game is a “database thriller”, only… It’s something quite different, really.
When you come up with an idea for a game, and the writing process has started, are you thinking of the game mechanics at the same time, or does that normally come at a later part of the process?
We think about them at the same time. My first question when writing a game is usually “What do the buttons do?” Which is to say, what are the things the player will actually be doing, and how do we tell a story with those verbs? The inkle philosophy is “whatever the player is doing, the protagonist is doing; and whatever the protagonist is doing, the player is doing.” That means no cutscenes, no abstractions – or as few as we can get away with, anyway. So you have to find verbs that allow you to express your story, and that means making mechanics that afford interesting storytelling.
Once we have the basics of a design down, the process is really fun, because – by starting with game and narrative in concert – the rest of the game can build on that: mechanics feed the story, and the story feeds new twists on the mechanics.
You dropped a new game announcement out of nowhere this week for TR-49. It sounds like a fascinating project. Can you tell us about the game’s inspiration and anything else you can say right now?
50 old books in my late great uncle’s attic – a schematic for a machine that they might have built at Bletchley Park – voices, but I can’t quite make out what they’re saying – something called Dark Matter Entanglement. I shouldn’t have said that last part. If your blog gets shut down after this, that’s the search term that did it. You should consider redacting it.
As I mentioned, you’ve made some truly wonderful, narrative experiences, but which one has been the most fun to make?
Annoyingly, I love them all. Perhaps the most amazing was 80 Days because we had no idea what it would turn into when we started, and it just got better and better the more we poured into it. Expelled! was really fun to write but tricky to beta test; it’s like wrestling a river of spaghetti. Overboard was pretty fun, except it was lockdown, so no one was having *that* much fun.
So my answer is: the next one. The next one will be the most fun.
Keep up to date on TR-49 at the inkle website or follow inkle or Jon on BlueSky. If you would like to browse inkle’s back catalogue to see if you’ve missed one, give their Steam page a look over, give my article on AdventureX a read to find out about my experiences with the event and finally if you are intruiged by AdventureX you can find more info on what they do over on their website.
