A Short Journey Through Souls Of Innsbrook's Development

​Souls Of Innsbrook started out as a small idea on paper inspired by our friends tabletop campaign. It is heavily inspired by his stories and a love letter to his work. Together with new people we created this game and it meant the world to us. There was challenges throughout our production, especially as my first project working as a Game Designer, but I couldn't be more proud of me and my team. In this blog I wanted to break down some of the key challenges we faced and how we overcame them.

​Platform: Windows PC

Engine: Unity, Fungus Package

Duration: 9 Months​

Year: 2024-25

Team Size: Started at 3, increased to 6 after first month.

Role: Lead Game Designer, Writer, Programmer.

Poster Art By Haydn Williams and Laurie Eaton.

As Game Designer. I was in charge of designing on the gameplay loop and game feel, narrative, and core mechanics; such as the item system, 'Challenge' System, combat system, dialogue system, and more.

My Goals For the project where as follows:

- Create a compelling narrative experience that is repayable.

-  Create a defined, hopeless atmosphere that sells that dark fantasy setting.

- Built the games repeatability off players want to win.

- Learn the Fungus Package in order to program the dialogue.

Intial Game Concepts by myself.

One of the first concepts planned was the idea of drilling the main goal into the players heads from game start, the goal being to 'GET TO THE GATE'. I wanted the players to be reminded of their goal every time they died and had to restart the experience.

I also followed the idea that the player is not looking for the best outcome, they’re looking to win. This resulted in a meat grinder like gameplay style in which players would replay the experience over and over again to win.

Once they win they will be greeted with the outcome of their actions and how it's effected the people, making the first goal to beat the game and the second goal to get a better outcome (adding to the Replay value).

​The replay value increased as the item system developed. Originally we planned for stat based and turn based combat, but many playtests disliked it and felt the gameplay should reflect the dark nature of the games atmosphere and narrative better. So we developed two systems, the item system and the 'Challenge' system.

Items would now be used to progress passed combats encounters as each monsters weakness' and resistances' would require players to explore, die, and come back packed with the right items to target the enemy's weakness or neutrality. 

And the 'Challenge' system would require players to prepare for potential encounters that aren't combat, encounter in which if they don't have an item to save themselves they're risk taking a 'Mortal Wound'.

In Game Screenshot featuring Art by Emma Shaw, Haydn Williams and Laurie Eaton, and myself.

Grievous wounds was an early idea in the project which would debilitate the player in certain ways if they were unprepared for long term travel and combats. However, when the camping system and other early systems were scrapped it meant this system was forgotten. It wasn't until a lecturer suggested punishing the player for  not preparing for combat, beyond death, that we thought of the 'Mortal Wound' system. The 'Mortal Wound' system meant that ending combat at low health or falling certain Challenges would result in a Mortal Wound.​ You can take 3 Mortals Wounds, your fourth resulting in a game over. 

This added a lot of stakes to leaving town unprepared and and became a reason for the players to think beyond brute forcing combats and encounters.​

In Game Screenshot featuring Art by Emma Shaw, Haydn Williams and Laurie Eaton, and myself.

That was just some of the challenges we had to face during the game production, there were plenty more huge and even tiny issues we faced during production. But I couldn't be more proud of what we made together. I could go on and on about how I would further our game and wrap it all in a bow, (though I doubt I could ever truly place a pin in it), but our game was made as our Third Year University project and thus we suffered a time limit.

We brought our game to Falmouth University Game Expo 2025 and entered our game into the 2025 The Rookies. We were so pleased by the amount of people who visited our booth, and a personal thank you from me here to all those who came. We had many players come back the next day claiming they would in fact beat it this time, and some truly did! Thank you all so much for supporting us and I am so excited for what my future holds as a Game Designer.

Elora Wainwright