- Gremlins, Grants, and GameDev - 16 September 2026
Greetings everybody! Looking back, the last couple of blog posts were a map / lore close-up, and a collaborator interview. That means the last time we really looked at what’s going on development wise was… (checks notes) February! Time flies. With that in mind, and given various developments, I thought a general situation roundup would be a good idea for this post. So what’s new in the world of Innkeep?GremlinsLeading with the biggest news, you might be aware if you are a member of our discord channel, the lead developer (that’s me) has recently become a dad to a baby girl! I stepped away from active game development through July to help mum out. I’m now back working on the game daily again (although still fairly sleep deprived.)(My wife says that this quickly painted over picture of our gremlin looks ‘spooky’. What do you think?)I’m wondering if I can sneak a baby into Innkeep now. Per…
- Who doesn't love a good map? - 21 June 2026
Let’s Talk About LoreGreetings everybody! As teased at the end of my last blog post, it’s time to take a closer look at the setting of Innkeep, the world of Cirrhul. More specifically, we’re going to show off our gorgeous new map!I’m also going to take this opportunity to talk about LORE. And not just in relation to some of the details of the setting, but about lore in general, and about why Innkeep has quite a lot of it.But before moving on, feast your eyes……on this!This beautiful map was created for us by master fantasy cartographer Fernando Salvaterra. It centers on a place known as the Divine Empire of Cirrhul, which is comprised of six provinces. These provinces surround a central mountainous location known as the Valley of the Incarnates. It is in this valley that our game takes place, within the isolated Weary Pilgrim inn. I’ll take a closer look at some of the locations shown in…
- Getting Medieval: An Interview with Innkeep Contributor James Baillie - 21 April 2026
Hail and well met! How farest thou? Ahem. As you probably already know, Steam is hosting a medieval festival, and Innkeep is participating! This seems like a good opportunity to chat about Innkeep and things medieval with our narrative consultant and song writer, James Baillie. James is a bonafide academic medievalist, specialising in Byzantine and Georgian history, as well as a game developer, writer, and all-round creative type. He is the founder of the online creative community, Exilian, and also runs Coding Medieval Worlds, an ongoing yearly conference that brings together medievalists and game developers. When you’re encountering some particularly interesting lore in Innkeep, or listening to a cool song, there’s a good chance that James is behind it!James Baillie with a bird friend.Hi James! Could you tell us what medievalism actually is? What is a medievalist? Tell me what you get…
- Developing the Cooking System - 17 February 2026
Hello and happy new year! Wait, it’s February already?! Well, happy Chinese New Year!In any case, it’s well past time for another blog post! Last time, I took a look at the design of the thief minigame. This month Innkeep is joining in on Raw Fury’s Global Foodie Faire, so it felt like a good time to take a closer look at the cooking system.Where to put the Kitchen?From the beginning of this game’s very long development history, I knew that I wanted to have a kitchen where the player could cook things. The question was where to put it. The initial main play space was taken up by the commonroom, and the connected bedrooms.The answer seemed to be that we needed to go downwards, having the camera drop, and fading in new floors and walls. Initially I positioned it directly below the bar, but then decided I wanted space for a large stables, and moved it off to the left.This turned out to be…
- Building The Thief Minigame - 17 November 2025
Hi everybody! Pull your belly up to the bar, and let me get you a drink. Because it’s time for another Innkeep developer update.Last time, we had a big picture overview of the kinds of things that we’ve had to work on now that we are moving from a prototype to an actual game. Check out that post if you haven’t already to see what we’ve been up to the past year!Next I think it would be cool to do a series of posts looking at these different systems in more detail. (I’ve already talked a bit about the eavesdropping and charming system before, although I think we can revisit it at some point to show more concretely how it works). Let’s kick off this series with a look at the thief minigame. Initial ConceptFrom very early on in the development process for Innkeep, I realized that you should be able to go into the bedrooms of your guests and steal from them while they slept. To this end, I b…
- Moving From a Concept to an Actual Game - 9 September 2025
Hi everybody! It’s well past time for another developer update. Work progresses on the game as always! There’s a lot I’d like to share real soon. However, I thought it might be a good idea to first write a post where I talk more broadly about what I’ve been up to, rather than focusing on any particular element. For most of the past year or so I’ve been working on bringing Innkeep from a concept (albiet a quite polished concept!) to a fleshed out mechanical system, with all the major components in place. If you’ll forgive an analogy, one way of putting it is that I’ve needed to finish up with all the outlining (drawing the shape, the form), before starting on coloring in between those lines (adding all the content).(A prototype expedition system. We’ll have to come back to this another day!) Imagine the state of the game as a drawing of a man (perhaps an Innkeeper!) A year ago we had som…
- 50,000 Wishlists and a Wedding! - 17 July 2025
Hi everybody! I'm very pleased to announce that over 50,000 people have now wishlisted Innkeep on steam! Wow. It's a dream come true to see this level of support and interest in the game, especially after working on it in the relative wilderness for such a long time.It might be a small thing for each person to hit that "wishlist" button, but the cummulative effect has effectively changed my life. Most significantly, evidence of interest in the game was really helpful in securing our publisher deal, which allowed me to go into gamedev full time. Speaking of which, you might be wondering about recent radio silence on my end. Work continues at a good pace behind the scenes, but something else that has been going on was that I've finally gotten married to my wonderful and supportive partner of many years! This is another one of those things we'd put off, because my employment wasn't super s…
- Devlog #1 - A Ten Year Journey - 8 June 2025
Hi everybody! Now that Innkeep has funding and extra support, it feels like a great time to reboot my old dev diary series, now referred to as "devlogs". I'm starting out at #1, talking about my own story, and the 10 year journey it's been getting to this point. As well as the way in which classic RPGs like the Ultima series was a big inspiration, leading into a core design ethos of the game: being able to interact with tangible things. This time I have a script, a proper microphone, and I can use a video editor. So it's a big jump in quality from the old days. Phoar! Hope you enjoy it! And please do consider liking and commenting on the video to help the algorithm so that the video can find more potential viewers. ːsteamthumbsupːSo long, and see you soon~!Daniel
- Innkeep lets you play an extremely suspect fantasy innkeeper, though I'm sure the bloodstains on your apron can be easily explained - 8 June 2025
The classic life sim begins with you inheriting property—a farm or a shop that you take over in a legal and above-board fashion. Innkeep does not begin like that. As the trailer revealed at the Frosty Games Fest shows, Innkeep opens with you walking through the door of a tavern in time to see its owner's head leave his shoulders. The customers, a gang of tomb robbers, essentially bully you into replacing the innkeeper. Little do they realize, you'd already stolen a letter of ownership and were planning to take the place over anyway... Read more.
- An Interview with our Composer, Filippo Beck Peccoz - 3 June 2025
Greetings everybody! For this month's update, I thought it would be cool to have a chat with our composer, Filippo. Because music is so integral to the experience, a good composer can really help make a game into something special. Fortunately for us, we have a great composer! We’re super excited about what Filippo has planned for Innkeep on the music front, and thought it would only be fair to ask him to share some of his knowledge about the craft and what goes into it. Hi Filippo! Hello Daniel, thanks for having me here! First off, what kind of other games have you worked on? Are there some titles that people might be familiar with? I’ve composed music for all the Mimimi Stealth-Strategy titles, from Shadow Tactics, to Desperados 3 and their last project, Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew. If you’re into visual novels, last year I scored “Tavern Talk” by Gentle Troll. A personal, but not…
- Amazing Animations and Fancy Foley - 1 April 2025
https://i0.wp.com/innkeepgame.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Morgan_Idle_Standing_Large.gif?resize=512%2C512&ssl=1 Greetings everybody! It's time to see what’s new in the world of Innkeep! March was another very busy month for development. With the locking-in of some core game mechanics surrounding eavesdropping and conversations a few months ago, we’ve shifted to working on an early build of the game that internal playtesters can get their hands on. This has meant writing a lot of dialogue that uses the new system we’ve designed, but also getting other parts of the experience up to scratch: sound and graphics. https://i0.wp.com/innkeepgame.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/sfx_studio_1_smaller.png?resize=768%2C576&ssl=1 The studio in Munich where the sounds for Innkeep are being recorded. On the sound front, we now have our own foley recorded SFX brought into the game, replacing earlier s…
- Dev Log: The Gods of Innkeep - 24 February 2025
Greetings! Welcome back to the Weary Pilgrim. Draw up a chair and let me pour you an ale. It’s time for a little February update. Today we're going to get into a little bit of lore. :-) Innkeep is more than just a job simulator, or a management game. It’s also a narrative adventure set in a fantasy world. Although for the most part you stay within the walls of the Weary Pilgrim, the people and problems of that world come to you. That means it’s really important that we make that world an interesting and believable place for you to come to understand and care about. To this end, the world of Innkeep has its own history, politics, geography, myths and legends. That includes its own gods! In fact, the Divine Cirrhulian Empire, where Innkeep is set, has six official gods (and an outcast seventh god). Each of these gods is the patron of one of the six provinces of the empire. We got a chance…
- Happy Chinese New Year! - 28 January 2025
The Innkeep team would like to wish everybody a happy Chinese New Year! We hope you’ve had plenty of good food to eat with your family! We’ve been so happy to see so much interest in our game from China. Your support has made a huge difference! 在新的一年里，福气满满，好事连连，事事如意，蛇年行大运！
- Dev Log: Conversations and Clues in Innkeep - 22 January 2025
Greetings everybody! It’s January, and we’ve been back to work on Innkeep for a couple of weeks already. In fact, a few core gameplay systems have recently firmed up through further prototyping, and I thought it would be nice to share some details about them. In Innkeep, the fantasy of being an innkeeper has a few different components. Yes, you’re serving food and drink, cooking, putting more wood on the fire, bustling about. But it’s also a game about listening in on conversations, and about talking to people, trying to set them at ease so that you can wheedle more information out of them. That’s something I’ve been firm on from very early on. What I wasn’t entirely sure of for quite some time was just how conversations and charming could be implemented. I definitely had a general direction I wanted to go in. But it needed to meet several requirements… Paused, Time Sensitive, and Unfol…
- Innkeep - End of Year Developer Update! - 2 December 2024
Greetings Tavern Dwellers! It’s been a super busy year for the development of Innkeep, and I wanted to get an update in for you all before we hit 2025. There is a lot to cover in today’s update, so hunker down and grab your tastiest brew, in your finest tankard of course. Wishlist Milestone We recently reached a major milestone for Innkeep with 35,000 wishlists (and at time of writing this is actually even higher than this). I want to give a big thank you to the community for their continued support and I cannot wait to share more of the game with you in the coming months. Dev Diary Videos Incoming~! Speaking of sharing more of the game, I’d like to get more frequent with development updates in 2025, so starting in January I am going to aim to bring one developer diary style video monthly/bi-monthly. This will be me sitting down, talking you through some of the features we are implement…
- Big News! - 19 August 2024
Greetings future innkeepers! Today I’ve got two pieces of news to share. One is pretty cool. The other is, dare I say it, fantastic! Let’s start with the pretty cool thing. Recently, I set up a little game studio to develop Innkeep. It’s called Boot Disk Games. The name is a nod to the old boot disk I’d use to play a certain classic RPG back in the 90s. It’s supposed to evoke a bit of nostalgia for old school PC gaming goodness, which is at the heart of what I want to deliver. Yes, it’s still me wearing most of the various hats, indie style, but formally having a studio does make it easier to bring on board talented collaborators to help get this game made. That brings us to the fantastic thing: Innkeep now has a publisher! Boot Disk Games will be collaborating with Mythwright, a publisher recently founded by industry veterans. Mythwright’s people have decades of combined experience, ha…
- Innkeep satisfies my craving for a fantasy game that's just a grim drudgery simulator - 23 April 2024
I'm the kind of awful person who looks at the background actors in TV shows and wonders what life is like for e.g. the old woman who sells birdfeed in Trafalgar Square in Mary Poppins when said upper-middle class domestic isn't singing about her. What fate the Warcraft grunt when he is too old to work work? It's probably pretty bad, right? Now let me slop Innkeep down in front of you like a big bowl of rat stew. Developer Daniel Burke furnished me with a little playable slice, and boy, Innkeep is a grim old time. I mean that as a compliment. In it you run a big pub with room for a lot of grizzled adventurers, in a dog-eat-dog dark fantasy RPG sort of a world - think a roadside pub in one of the early seasons of Game Of Thrones, before everyone hated it. You do a lot of plate-spinning drudgery like cooking, cleaning, and serving, but also eavesdropping, rumourmongering, and knowing when…
- Innkeep Development Update for April - 23 April 2024
Greetings everyone! The last few months have seen a lot of progress on Innkeep. In fact I’ve been so busy with development that I forgot to make time to post an update! I’ll work on writing something semi-regularly going forward. One major milestone reached is that I’ve finished writing the dialogue for the demo / prologue of the game. It still needs editing down, but it’s basically all there, alongside the scripting of some cool events. One involving a certain ritual... Along the way, I’ve also done quite a bit of work on some of the core game loop, experimenting with how certain key player verbs (eavesdropping, charming) are going to work. I implemented a book that you can examine to find out what clues you have learned from different guests, and the ability to ask guests about those clues. I also got this demo out into the hands of a lot of people in order to get some feedback. I’ll…
- Innkeep Dev Diary: Wishlist Tsunami and an Alpha Build Push, Oh My - 6 December 2023
Hi everyone! It's December already, and I thought it was a good time to write a blog post on recent Innkeep news. https://innkeepgame.com/development-update-2-wishlist-tsunami-and-an-alpha-build-push-oh-my/ This one covers... - What happened with the recent wishlist tsunami (could be of interest to other indie devs!) - Recent discussions with publishers (quite a few!) - Progress on (and future current roadmap for) the alpha build. If you like dev posts or you're just curious about some behind the scenes details, check it out! Hope everyone has a great end to the year, and a decent break. Best, Daniel
- 20,000 Wishlists! - 15 November 2023
Hello everybody! I'm excited to announce that over 20,000 people have now wishlisted Innkeep on steam (now over 22 thousand to be more precise!) Thanks to this wishlist surge, Innkeep is now in the top 1000 most wishlisted upcoming games on Steam! Not bad hey? :-) Thank you everyone so much for hitting that wishlist button. And I want to give a shout-out in particular to Chinese streamers who have given Innkeep some attention. 谢谢您！ Wishlists are like mana from heaven for little indie devs, and it really helps to keep us motivated. But that's not all they do. They also help us get attention! Along with this cool milestone, I'd like to share that I have been chatting with a number of new publishers over the past few weeks (on top of a few that I've been speaking with over the last year or so). While it is still somewhat early days, I hope I will have some awesome news to share on that fro…
