Developer Shiny Shoe has made a name for itself in the world of strategic roguelikes, with both deckbuilder Monster Train and tactical title Inkbound launching to high critical acclaim. First founded in 2011, Shiny Shoe has also had a hand in several popular remakes, like Grim Fandango and Full Throttle. Inkbound has received several content additions since it was released last year, including a brand-new update this week that includes new Bindings, Vestiges, and a special challenge mode.

Shiny Shoe co-founder Mark Cooke has a history with video games that stretches long before the studio was formed. He attended his first Game Developer’s Conference at only 15, and worked as an intern on multiple projects at LucasArts – including the original Grim Fandango. Shiny Shoe’s original projects take on a more strategic slant, with both Monster Train and Inkbound receiving praise for their depth and incredible replayability. As its 13-year anniversary approaches, it seems as though Shiny Shoe is just getting started.

Screen Rant interviewed Shiny Shoe co-founder and CEO Mark Cooke to talk about Inkbound‘s latest update, how the studio has grown, and what’s next for the developer.

Mark Cooke Talks Shiny Shoe’s History

Humble Beginnings In A “Pizza Oven” Office

Screen Rant: Shiny Shoe has been around for over a decade now, and of course the release of a new game is a memorable milestone in and of itself, but outside of those really huge milestone moments, are there any other moments that really stand out to you as especially pivotal or just really good memories of the company?

Mark Cooke: Sure. Looking back now, we’re coming up on our 13-year anniversary. The company was founded in 2011 sometime in the summer, and our official date when we registered with the California state government to create an actual company was August 1, so easy to remember at least.

I have fond memories of that very first office and setup that we had where there was no windows and you could just barely fit three people in a tiny room, and it was like times were simpler. Times were simpler back then, and we started with the indie dream of make amazing games that are memorable and loved by players and hopefully get paid something doing that, so certainly that is a fond memory of mine.

Speaking of office space, probably another milestone for us was around year five when we got a decent office. So many of the spaces we had before that were subleases in a space that was like a factory or a windowless office that my co-founder lovingly called the pizza oven, because it was all brick and incredibly hot in the summer. [Laughs] This [gesturing to the brick wall behind him] looks very similar. This looks like a pizza oven. However, if I turned the camera around, you would see a nicer looking office on the other side. In any case, that was a nice one.

Some other things that we did that maybe is more unknown – certainly the thing that we’re most known for is Monster Train, Inkbound as well, but we worked on a bunch of games before that, some original some with other studios. We released a game that was super fun, it was super unusual, it was inspired by Twitch Plays Pokemon. We made a game called Death’s Door – not to be confused with a game that came out later, also called Death’s Door that was published by Devolver, I think.

Our Death’s Door was a gothic horror RPG played on a Twitch channel that we were the broadcaster, so it was only one channel. You’d go to that channel and you’d play the game there. It was just so weird and fun being a part of something where there was all these community memes coming up in Twitch chat surrounding this bizarre game that we made. Because it was so low budget, we could just lean into anything that the community was coming up with. We’d just put it in the game right away and that was a really fun and very different experience making games.

You mentioned remaking some games and stuff, and I know you worked at LucasArts as well. I’m curious what it was like for you to work on these remasters of games that you were also present for when they were made the first time.

Mark Cooke: That was really cool. I was so lucky to have been able to work on Grim Fandango originally in the mid-90s. At that time I was an intern, I think I was 15 years old. I was a programming intern and I’m sure not a line of code that I wrote got shipped in that game. I don’t know for sure, but that’s how I feel – seems likely. [Laughs[ But I felt incredibly lucky.

That summer I got to work on Grim Fandango and Dark Forces II Jedi Knight, both of which are like 90-plus Metacritic games from the old days, so that was super lucked out there. Then we got the opportunity to work with Double Fine on remastering Grim Fandango, Day of the Tentacle, and Full Throttle. Shiny Shoe did a substantial amount of the work on those projects, and it was really cool to be involved in getting to work on those games again, and a cool career connection for me to have been an intern on the original Grim Fandango and then get to be part of the team remastering it. Double Fine had their Two Player Productions camera crew, they were always there and we got to be part of a documentary of the making of the remaster, which was really awesome. It was very interesting to get to revisit my past in that way and have a connection to it.

One kind of wacky anecdote that came up from the fact that I had worked on the original and then got to work on the remaster is I submitted a GDC talk to talk about the remastering process, and one of the reviewers who was reviewing the proposal was like, “Oh, you were an intern on this game. Why are you proposing a GDC talk?” I’m like, “No, those are the original credits. You got to look at the remaster credits.” They were trying to say, “You shouldn’t do this because you’re just an intern.” It was like you just Googled my name and looked at the credits of the original game from the 90s or something.

In any case, it was awesome. That game is so beloved, Grim Fandango. I mean, all those games are, but Grim Fandango especially, I think. To be able to bring it to new audiences – it’s cool.

Developing Monster Train & Inkbound

Learning From The Past & The Art Of Nerfing

Moving into your original IPs a little bit more, I’m curious what you’d say the biggest lessons you took from Monster Train into Inkbound were?

Mark Cooke: I think for us, we like to say in some of our marketing that we’ve tried to take the design DNA from Monster Train and put it into Inkbound, even though they’re not the exact same type of game. For us right now in our original titles, we’re focusing on strategic roguelikes, so a lot of the lessons that we took were what makes a game like that compelling to people, in terms of both moment to moment mechanics as well as overarching game loops, and trying to create what we’ve been calling poggable moments, where you can get an amazing synergy in a run of the things that you’re drafting, your build, so to speak. You’re picking up these different items and trying to create like, “Oh, I really want to get this one thing and everything would be perfect,” and then you get it and you’re like, “Yes!”

Trying to create interesting systems where poggable moments are possible is part of our design goals. We tried to take some of the lessons of what we felt worked well in Monster Train and try to bring those into Inkbound. I’d say that’s the main thing on the design side, even though there were other objectives that were different. Like we wanted to try going heavily into cooperative multiplayer, which was different for us. Overall, the way the game looks, feels, controls is different. There’s some of the old, some new, and certainly another bunch of lessons on the art pipeline side and the technical side and so on, where we’re just iteratively trying to improve all the time. I think many people would say the same thing, but we’re just always trying to get better at the craft, and so we continue to try to improve little by little in all areas of what we’re working on.

Saying that does remind me of something that is really important to us as a studio and that we did try to improve as we went and are continuing to improve: our mechanisms for players to communicate with us and give us feedback. This has been a big part of our game since Shiny Shoes’ Death’s Door era, which is creating ways to talk to our community. That includes the simple stuff like social media, Discord and so on, which we find is important to manage well and foster kind of positive, constructive communities.

For us, the thing that we’ve done that I would tell every game developer to do because it’s been so useful, is create an in-game mechanism for people to submit feedback to us. We do that because somebody who’s playing your game, right in the moment, they might experience something frustrating or something that they liked and be like, “Oh, I just want to tell a developer,” so we just have a button you can push, it brings up this thing, you can just type in whatever you’re feeling and then you can send it to us and it comes directly into a Slack channel that the entire dev team can see.

It has your message, a screenshot of what you were doing, and various other metadata that’s useful for the developers. We have continued to improve that system to make it easier to use for our team to create actionable ways to organize information, to look for trends through that stuff and so on through feedback. We’ve continued to try to improve that system and grow it over time because we find it so valuable, and so that’s been a big thing for us.

That’s really cool. You mentioned building these poggable moments through lots of cool synergies and different mechanics that work together. For both Monster Train and Inkbound, were there any mechanics that you really maybe wanted in the game but you just couldn’t make work in synergy with everything else? Like it just didn’t fit?

Mark Cooke: One thing that’s coming to mind about Inkbound specifically that we think we couldn’t get in in the way that we would’ve liked to is some elements around randomization, which we think are important for creating poggable moments. There is all kinds of randomization, and it’s a roguelike, so there’s a lot of that when it comes to things like drafting and picking abilities and new items to find as you go through your run, and what’s available in the shop at any one point in time and so on and so forth.

We wanted to put, in retrospect, a bit more randomization in some of the core combat, because a game like a card game has a lot of randomization inherent in the way that a card game is kind of defined. You’re drawn a hand of cards, the hand of cards is different on every turn just innately – people understand that and they’re used to it. In Inkbound, you have an ability bar more akin to World of Warcraft, and there had been one example of a game that experimented with randomizing the ability bar, but that really doesn’t work – we think – as a design, because you start to get muscle memory of like, “Oh, this button does this,” and you want to have that kind of locked in.

We were looking later to try to find more ways to insert more randomization into Inkbound, but by the time we got to the point where we wished we had a little bit more, it was hard to figure out how to make that happen within the other design constraints that had already been established. That was something specific that comes to mind that we couldn’t figure out a way to get in there synergistically with everything else that was going on. I think another thing related to that is we really wanted to support cooperative multiplayer. Inkbound supports two to four player co-op and that also puts other types of constraints that were new to us, because our previous games had been predominantly single player, so certainly some design learning there on our end.

In terms of Monster Train, was there ever just a single card where it was like, “This guy is too OP? He’s so cool, but we just can’t put him in the game because it’s just too overpowered.”

Mark Cooke: Yeah, we definitely had cards that were really overpowered that we nerfed over and over and over. Even after the game shipped, we shipped them not realizing how good they were going to be. We thought they were good, but didn’t know how good until – we do analytics on gameplay data to make balanced decisions. We use that as part of our process for making balanced decisions, and there’s a card in Monster Train I that got nerfed over and over that’s called Onehorn’s Tome, if I’m remembering correctly. It’s from the Hellhorned Clan. It’s a spell card. It’s not a creature, but it gives multi-strike to the target, which is an ability that lets them attack again. That card is so overpowered, because multi-strike is so good in Monster Train that we had to keep increasing its Ember cost, because there wasn’t any way to change it otherwise.

It’s great that there’s a bunch of knobs in the game to turn things in different ways, but it’s like – it just gives multi-strike. That’s what it does, so you can’t make that any weaker in any other capacity really. Let me look that up and make sure that that’s the correct name.

Now I want to start picking it when I play.

Mark Cooke: I just Googled it. The first thing is “Onehorn’s Tome Rebalance,” it’s a Reddit thread. It’s probably people complaining about the balance changes. [Laughs] Yep, it costs five Ember, I think it started at three.

Oh, that’s so much.

Mark Cooke: Oh, we did make it weaker. We made another thing, it applies a status effect called fragile to the target, which makes them, I think if they take any damage, they die – but it was still good.

I think players often don’t like nerfs, which is understandable, but sometimes you have to for the health of the game, because it’s not interesting if the best strategy is to pick the same thing every single time. It’s always a challenge to meet player expectations with nerfs and ensure player happiness when you do have to bring out some nerfs sometimes for the health of the game.

Oh, that’s so delightful. I’m going to start picking that one up. I think I probably avoided it because of the high ember cost, but now I have inside info.

Mark Cooke: It’s still good, it’s still good. That’s what the data says. [Laughs]

Inkbound’s New Update & Future Plans

What Fans Can Expect Next From Shiny Shoe

There have already been a few supporter packs released for Inkbound since it first came out, and I’m curious how much other content you guys have planned, if you even have a full picture of that or if you can share what that is. Do you foresee semi-regular updates?

Mark Cooke: Yeah, we have a new content update coming we think in late June. We haven’t 100% locked that in yet, but that’s our goal. That’s going to add some new types of challenges for players who are looking for more things to complete and new kind of adventures, so to speak, within the world of Inkbound.

We are aiming to continue to support the game predominantly with free content updates and just trying to make sure everybody can have the best experience possible with things like bug fixes and balance changes as we continue to look at similar data. Where’s the Onehorn’s Tome in Inkbound? Where’s the thing that’s weak? That’s a thing that I think players appreciate more: look for the things that are underpowered or not being picked often because they’re perceived to be uninteresting or whatever, and change those to be more interesting. That’s really our focus on Inkbound right now.

Thinking outside of Inkbound, is there anything else in the pipeline for you guys right now that you’re allowed to talk about at all?

Mark Cooke: Allowed to talk about, no. Is there something in the pipeline? Yes. We are starting to do some prototyping for future games is one of the things that we’re up to right now. Not quite sure exactly where that’s going to go yet, but like I said, we’re kind of sticking to strategic roguelikes and trying to find new areas to explore and – hopefully – innovate in that area. That’s kind of an ongoing project for us right now. We had everybody who works here working on Inkbound for a long time, and so we’re starting up something small to figure out what the future is beyond that.

You mentioned the appeal of poggable moments that are found through the effects of having a blend of strategy and randomization and that sort of thing. Outside of the creation of those special moments, what do you find it is that keeps you coming back to turn-based combat and roguelike elements when you’re making something new?

Mark Cooke: What appeals to me as a player is when there is a high density of interesting decisions, and it feels like every run is different and the structure of the game and the run length is such that it can fit within sessions that feel like they’re accommodating towards a busy person’s life. That’s one of the appeals to me in the genre is that often you don’t have to have a ton of context. I used to love playing single-player RPGs, hundreds of hours, all kinds of story, and I still do love them. I just have a hard time playing them because I put them down for three weeks and then when I come back I’m like, “What am I doing again? Where am I? Better just delete my save and start over. That’ll be easier.”

Versus a roguelike game has the run structure. It’s like you come in, I don’t need any context other than the base understanding of the system and the rules there. You can play often and finish a run in under an hour, which is an appealing game structure to me. For us, part of the reason why we continue to make games is the appeal of those things in that genre, but also, we think we’re getting better at it too, and we have ambitions to make the top game in the genre and be remembered for making a really awesome game. That’s why we’re continuing to try to get better at making games in that genre by continuing to iterate on it, learn from our past games, and that’s our strategy right now.

What games right now do you find yourself being most creatively inspired by?

Mark Cooke: I am personally really stuck playing a game that has nothing to do with turn-based roguelikes. I am really into Splatoon 3. I’m so into Splatoon 3, and I love the world building and street-style squid kids. It’s just so cool. That has a high level of appeal to me visually, and I’ve always liked competitive shooter type games since I was a kid. It’s basically a competitive online shooter, and so that’s been really fun to me, and I’m playing with my kids. The fact that it’s kid friendly has made it fit into my life easier, because my daughters who are fairly young can play it with me. It’s not violent or gory or realistic in any fashion, it’s cute and you’re shooting colorful ink.

I think the thing that inspires me from that game that I would like to try to continue to put into our games is the cohesiveness of its world in terms of the way things look, the way things sound. Even the core gameplay, it’s all ink because you’re squids and octopus and they have ink that they can utilize in the real world. If you think about it, I know it’s this crazy fantasy world, but it’s like everything feels like it makes sense to be there. The music in the game, there’s backstories for the bands. They made album art for the bands, so the bands have a persona to them, and I find that kind of really engaging. Once you get into a game in IP, it’s like, “Oh, I want to know all this stuff,” and it’s like, “Oh, there’s lore behind why does this brass band sound this way?”

It’s called Yoko & the Gold Bazookas. That’s an awesome name. Who came up with that? Just the fact that there’s all this stuff that’s thought through. I want our games to also feel that cohesive in terms of all the aspects of it coming together. I feel like we did a pretty good job of that in Monster Train and Inkbound, and I want to keep getting better at that. That’s something that’s inspiring me from Splatoon 3. Gameplay wise, we’re not going to make something anything close to that I don’t think.

Which part of this update was the most challenging to develop, or took the most iteration?

Authored Challenges are the new feature that went through the most iteration in this update. Authored Challenges are special challenge runs with unique twists. At one point, we had class-themed Authored Challenges, like Magma Miner, with mechanics that changed the way their passive worked and ‘magma’ themed difficulty adjustments. The class restriction made it hard to be creative about the kinds of gameplay changes we wanted, so we dropped that, as well as some Authored Challenges with an effect that didn’t feel fundamentally different enough from a regular run. Most of the iteration went into trying to find that interesting tension within a challenge, and finding ways to push the ‘game’ of that run even further.

The addition of more Bindings is quite exciting – what was the process like developing these new moves? How did the team decide what new combat mechanics they wanted to explore?

When designing new Bindings, internally we look at the current pool for things like underutilized mechanics and effects we can add that create interesting interactions. We also like to query our playtesters the kinds of things they would like to see. Both of the new Bindings this time around were suggestions from our playtesters. We already knew we wanted a Smite Binding but the initial design for Invocation was a bit different until one of our testers ‘Kitru’ suggested a new status effect to go with it. Discharge was an interesting idea from one of our testers ‘SybilznBitz’, of using Movement as a resource for a Binding, originally designed as a Smite Binding too. Testers have made suggestions in the past as well for vestiges and mutators, and the kind of back and forth with players we feel is really beneficial.

What are you most excited to see players react to in the new update?

Aside from new Bindings, Vestiges, and Authored Challenges, we’re also adding in a casual mode to let players play on a much lower difficulty, which is really useful when you’re just trying to complete a quest or unlock a new part of a story. There’s also a large bucket of QoL we’re pushing this update to improve the overall experience of the Logbook and Cosmetic Vault, as well as a bunch of new cosmetics in the game!