Inkle, the studio behind "80 Days" and this year's masterpiece "Overboard," has yet to name its next big project. Called simply "Highland Games" by the studio, it is a beautifully pictorial platformer with narrative elements set in the Scottish Highlands.

In an effort to be more transparent than ever about their development cycle, the development company has posted updates about the game's creation on their website. It is interesting to watch the team discuss early prototypes and delve into the process.

I recently spoke with Inkle co-founders John Ingold and Joseph Humphrey about the creation of Overboard.

"That's a tough one," Humphrey says. The interesting thing about this game is that we are trying to take a more open approach to development, the opposite of 'Overboard. Since we completed "Overboard," everyone has become more involved in the project, so everything is moving more quickly. Writing and development have all been accelerated.

Platformers are new to Inkle, where games are usually driven by dialogue. 'Unusually for an Inkle game, it incorporates very game-like mechanics. Unusually for an Inkle game, it incorporates very game-like mechanics. That's something we spend a lot of time on.

"We don't want it to feel like Celeste, where it's super punishing and you have to start over again and again. It's challenging, it's risky, but we don't want it to be this endless death loop." Finding our own space there is one of the biggest challenges right now."

Of course, being an Inkle game, narrative remains an important element of whatever the Highlands game ultimately becomes. Says Ingold, "This is part of our broader project to make the narrative seamless and excellent throughout the game. We have always looked at games and seen that the narrative is often implied but not engaged"

. [It is abstracted or detached from the game. It is often told by association. Whatever the genre, what we try to do is make sure that what is happening in the story is the same as what the player is doing. [If Inkle were to create a platformer, what kind of platformer would it be? Because we don't do that. That's how we imply a story."

Inkle's Highland game is still in its early days, but you can follow its creation process on the developer's official development blog. As someone who has spent a lot of time in the Scottish Highlands, I am curious to see how Inkle will translate that experience into a video game.