I'm only 30, and I often think I'm past my prime. But indie developer Inkle's co-founder Jon Ingold has given me hope. 14 years after the studio's first game Frankenstein hit iOS devices, its latest offering, the WW2-era puzzle game TR-49, is the team's best launch ever. No, literally.
"TR-49 is our best launch, ever, in 14 years," Ingold writes on Bluesky. "I admit I'm surprised! Made in nine months, mostly as an experiment to learn Godot, and an excuse to play with some actors. (And for me to do some acting.)"
TR-49 is a puzzle game where you have to feed books to an old computer to discover a world-changing secret. Ingold was a mathematical consultant on The Imitation Game, the movie about Alan Turing inventing the first computer to break the Enigma code in World War 2, so this seems right up his alley.
The reveal that TR-49 was made in just nine months is very impressive on its own. The fact that it's also the best launch Inkle has ever had makes it even more so. It reminds me of the recent success of Peak, the co-op climber Aggro Crab rustled up in a frantic four-week game jam, refining it in a few short months afterwards alongside Landfall. It sold two million copies in just nine days.
"If we're going to make that a sustainable model we might need to be able to make things a little bit quicker," Ingold continues, claiming that TR-49 can be completed in just four hours and costs $7, so it's a very low commitment for us players. "I love the basic concept of 'compact games,'" he writes. "Particularly for non-publisher indies who have less QA."
As Fallout co-creator Tim Cain said in a recent video, "more of one thing means less of another." If a game has a fixed budget and more features get added, that means there's less time and money for testing and big fixing.
Fortunately, Ingold is excited about making small games. "And the focus," he writes. "I love it as a player and as a dev! One thing, damn well, and done. And people see the end! This is huge for me, personally."
