The Inktide dev blog
Short essays by the people who make Inktide, about why the game behaves the way it does. The rules and the guide describe what happens in a match; these posts describe how it came to happen that way, including the places where we changed our minds after watching people play.
A post gets written when a decision deserves an explanation for the players it touches: something that works differently from what you might expect, a limit chosen on purpose, or a problem that took more than one attempt to solve. Every post describes the game as it runs now. When a later release makes one of them wrong, we correct the post rather than leave a stale explanation online, and the correction is recorded on the page of changes like any other.
Posts
How a private room works
What goes into a six-character invite, what a messenger actually fetches when you paste a room link, how a room lets friends in between rounds but not during one, and the reason a host is handed a lock and a kick button in place of a password. Published 15 September 2026.
Why the map has no countries
Where the coastlines of the shared map come from and which open data sets built it, the reasons no country name, frontier or flag will be drawn on it, and the check in our map pipeline that stops a map with a political label from being built at all. Published 15 September 2026.
Elsewhere on the site
- What's new is the dated list of changes to the game, newest first.
- How to play and Controls are the two pages to send a friend before their first match.
- Fairness and Rules are the commitments we make about matchmaking, money and conduct.
- About says who we are, and where to write when a post leaves you with a question.