By Steven Andrew 
In case you missed it, Shiny Shoe marked Inkbound‘s second anniversary back in April with a community post pulling early concept art straight from the studio’s internal archives.
Community manager ShinyCami walked through design iterations for three of the game’s base classes: the Magma Miner, the Weaver, and the Mosscloak. The Magma Miner saw the most dramatic transformation, trading its early mining-focused aesthetic, complete with headlamps, goggles, and a pickaxe, for the heavier armored look that shipped with the game. The evolution sketches make it clear the team was actively shifting the design toward communicating brute-force combat over occupational identity.
The Weaver’s visual design stayed fairly consistent across iterations. The bigger unknowns were its powers, with concept artist Daniel Sarmiento Chuquisengo producing a wide range of attack ideas in 2021, including levitation and a yarn-weaving ability that didn’t survive to launch.
The Mosscloak, front-and-center in Inkbound‘s key art, was always envisioned as a forest creature. Weapon type and color palette were the sticking points, with artist Luke Banke producing a broad range of green color studies before the team landed on the final look.
Aimee Rogers