Hello Xbox fans! Thanks for clicking the headline and checking out our game. Glad to have you here! So, first up, a little bit about us. We are a small studio called Yaza Games, and we are the makers of Inkulinati – a turn-based strategy in which a rabbit’s bum can be deadlier than a dog’s sword. We all met by pure chance at Game Design School in Poland, and Inkulinati (or the initial idea and prototype for it) was our final graduation project so to speak. That was nearly five years ago. Since then we’ve been building, improving, expanding and polishing Inkulinati, we’ve run a successful Kickstarter campaign, hooked up with Daedalic Entertainment as a publisher and we were able to do something together with Xbox too! Now we are getting ready to slowly bring Inkulinati to the world and we cannot wait to see and hear your reactions to it. But, let’s get back to the basics. Let us tell you a bit more about Inkulinati itself.
The story of Inkulinati began a few years ago at the aforementioned Game Design School in Warsaw. In the last months of our course, to graduate we had to create a prototype of a game. At first, we had absolutely no clue, no concept, and no solid idea for a game. The perfect spot to be in! We went through tons of ideas, but nothing felt right with us. Then, one day our Art Director Dorota, brought a book to class and she showed us these crazy medieval drawings – called “marginalia” – placed on the margins of manuscripts. We saw snails eating knights, sword-wielding bunnies duelling with dogs, and other crazy, mind-blowing stuff! We’d never seen anything like this before, and the more we looked at them, the more all of us got excited. We could feel something magical happen – a sense of electricity started to spark. That was the moment when we fell in love with medieval illuminations and marginalia. It was also the moment when we knew what our game was going to look like.
Now that we had the look, we needed to choose a genre. This came rather naturally. After a few chats we decided to go for a turn-based strategy genre. It felt right. We feel that this genre allows us to delve even further into the world of medieval manuscripts and it suits them better than anything else! The feel of the books, two enemies battling one another, even the pace, it all worked in unison. We felt we had the pieces put together. We had a game prototype!
Although we’ve been working on Inkulinati for some time, the original core ideas of the game have not changed. We want our game to be as authentic to both the medieval European manuscripts as well as the world and tales from that time. All the visuals, the world, as well as the humour is created by monks and scribes hundreds of years ago! We just bought it to a new medium – that of a video game. Our other core idea is that we want our game to be easy to pick up, but hard to master. There are a lot of strategic layers that we implemented in our game to keep your brain cells on your toes. Do not let medieval cuteness fool you!
We hope that you enjoyed our little tale of how our game Inkulinati came to be. When Inkulinati comes out on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Cloud, you’ll be able to experience both a single-player campaign and couch multiplayer battles too. We’ll be giving you more details on Inkulinati in the near future, so please do stay tuned. And until then, keep your quills, and minds, sharpened Inkulinati Apprentices!
All the best,
Yaza Games, on behalf of the Inkulinati Academy faculty