How Inkle's Heaven's Vault started life as a Doctor Who game, before it was exterminated

Did you know that once upon a time, Inkle's Heaven's Vault was actually going to be a Doctor Who game? No, I didn't either until this morning, when a social media post from Inkle's narrative director and writer Jon Ingold was brought to my attention.

This was a simple enough post. "Heaven's Vault started out as a Doctor Who game," Ingold wrote, while resharing another post about how Donkey Kong was originally a Popeye game. And there it was. In less than 10 words, Ingold had me hooked. I wanted to know more about this Doctor Who pitch, and how it ultimately became Heaven's Vault (a game we called "an archaeology adventure like no other" on its release in 2019).

So, of course, I slid into Ingold's DMs to find out more. And as luck would have it, he was up for sharing.

"Our game 80 Days was a huge critical success for us in 2014, and after it came out, we started having meetings with all sorts of people about doing something with their IPs," Ingold tells me when I ask how the idea for a Doctor Who game first came about. "One of those was an approach from the BBC, who floated several different BBC properties for us to consider working on. As a lifetime Doctor Who fan, that was the one we jumped on."

Ingold says the team then spent around eight months pulling together a pitch known as The Daedalus Effect, during which time they hired a concept artist and "thought through the details of the game and the story quite carefully". The idea was to set the game on "an asteroid on the edge of a black hole, where time dilation had you moving slowly / inexorably towards disaster". In fact, Inkle was so excited by the prospect of creating a Doctor Who game that even before getting the go-ahead, they had started early development.

"For the art style, we wanted 2D characters within a 3D scene for a comic-book look, so we built a TARDIS interior model, drew some character art, and built a prototype where you could move around the console room," he tells me. "We also built a playable 'fly through the vortex' game for the travel sequences, inspired by Super Hexagon. And the most significant thing we did was start rebuilding the ink engine, from the very scrappy first version that powered 80 Days and the Sorcery! series, to the more modern version that we eventually open-sourced."

However, despite enthusiasm from the studio, the BBC itself never got back to Inkle about its Doctor Who pitch ("technically, we're still waiting for a reply," Ingold remarks). So, the focus had to shift. "We needed to start work on something: we'd also been building Sorcery! 4 but that was finished, and we needed to commit to a project," Ingold recalls. "Finally, we took the decision to take the prototypes we'd built so far, and repurpose them into something that we could make on our own.

"The result was Heaven's Vault - a game that was, accidentally, way more ambitious than our previous games."

I ask which Whovian ideas still managed to make it into Heaven's Vault. "Doctor Who is, like Indiana Jones or Professor Quatermass or Lara Croft, a 'hot academic' - a smart intellectual who's also brave and good in a crisis. That's where the root of the main character of Aliya Elasra - she's a researcher, but she goes out into the world and takes risks to uncover the truth," he replies. "With her is a sidekick character whose job is to ask questions and demand explanations, so the audience can keep up: the classic Doctor Who companion, who in our game is the robot, Six."

Ingold adds: "Of course, Aliya is travelling around the Nebula - a network of rivers in space - which developed pretty directly from the 'time vortex' imagery you see (mostly in the opening credits of) Who."

That being said, Inkle felt that in moving away from the Doctor Who franchise the team could take on "a much more serious and considered tone" for its next release than it had first envisioned. "The player being an archaeologist meant the history of the Nebula was really important: it had to feel coherent and impactful, and the slapdash world-building of Doctor Who didn't suit [the world of Heaven's Vault]," Ingold explains.

"But I like to think we kept the emphasis on sharp and witty dialogue."

Thankfully, Ingold has no regrets from this pivot away from Doctor Who. "The Daedalus Effect would have been an excellent game: we had a really strong core concept. But the creative freedom of working on our own world was terrific, and we were able to push our story in a lot of different and unusual directions without asking permission, and that really let it fly," he says.

"Ten years later, if the chance to make a Who game came up again, I'm not sure what we'd do. I still love the character and the wild variety the concept would bring. But there's been a lot of Who games since 2014, and I feel like it'd be hard to capture the same excitement as we felt for the project when we first pitched it."

If he did make a Doctor Who game, though, his "head's still in the same place" as it was before. "The thing I kept coming back to was - as a player I wanted to hurtle through the wild time vortex, land somewhere without knowing where it was going to be, throw open the doors and step outside to see what was waiting for me... knowing that there would be a surprise in store. Will it be Ancient Rome this time? Or a jungle planet? Or the inside of a vast space whale?" he says.

"That moment of not knowing what's around the corner was the core experience we wanted to capture with the design of the game, and to capture it forty, fifty times while still feeding it back into the wrapper story of the Doctor's impending doom.

"I love the mix of adventure and character that Who brings. It's a huge part of my creative DNA."

As for Heaven's Vault - a game I am still coming to terms with beginning life as something with a Doctor Who wrapper - well of course Inkle has a lot of love for it, and it still holds a special place in Ingold's heart. "It was the first storyworld we invented from scratch, and we were worried people wouldn't connect with it at all, but six years on and we still have a community who write stories in the Ancient script (extending the language as they go), discuss the characters and the history of that world," he says.

"In 2021 we novelised the plot of the game - which was my first novel, and got me a literary agent for another book, which is out with publishers right now. And we're still continuing the story! The third Heaven's Vault novel came out in April, which picks up after the game and reveals a few enormous secrets that would have otherwise stayed forever hidden, and I'm working on the fourth as we speak. We've written a pilot episode and outline for an audio drama version (though we haven't sold it to anyone), and we've got one other big thing cooking for the world which we haven't announced yet, but is hopefully going to be truly wonderful for new players and for fans of the original.

"So, yes: Heaven's Vault has been huge for us creatively. It opened Inkle up a lot - until then we'd be doing adaptations and IP-based work. Heaven's Vault was the first thing we did that was all ours - and people embraced it - and that experience is what made A Highland Song, Overboard, and all the rest possible."

Ah yes, Overboard and A Highland Song, two games equally charming, but in their own ways. I tell Ingold that when I started Overboard I became quite hooked on it, and eventually had to limit myself to one run a day like a sort of Murder Mystery Wordle approach. So, what's the studio's secret for its games?

"When we founded Inkle we had one golden rule, which came about as a reaction to working on big triple-A games, we said 'the player is doing what the protagonist is doing, and the protagonist is doing what the player is doing," Ingold replies. "So that means no cutscenes where the characters hang out in a bar - the player gets to do that. And no picking up entire trees to craft arrows mid-fight - if the protagonist wants arrows, they'll need to make them in advance.

"It's a weird rule, but we use it all the time to decide things. Is this mechanic too gamey? Too abstract? Does it make sense in the story? I honestly think it's the secret that makes all of our games work. Every Inkle title is almost like a table-top RPG: there's a story happening, right now, and you're neck deep. So - just like if you're stepping out of the TARDIS doors - you never know what's going to be around the corner. It should feel, in that moment, like anything could happen - not just what the designer planned, or what the mechanics afford - anything."

The other secret, Ingold tells me, is Inkle "make things quickly, throw things away, and get bored easily, so we're always on to the next new idea".

"Even Expelled, which is a sequel, is mechanically a very different game than Overboard," he continues. "So I think people always know they're going to get a good story, interestingly told, and not the same game they've already played elsewhere."

So, what's next for Inkle? Well, nothing from Doctor Who, but the studio does have something up its sleeve. "We have a new game almost ready for launch, which we'll be revealing more details about it very, very soon," Ingold reveals. "This one is... different again.

"A different style of gameplay for us, though it has some roots in previous games, and a different style of narrative than we've attempted before. We recorded hours and hours of voice-over for this one! But the Inkle style is still there: it's character driven, it's thoughtful, it's got something to say, and while it borrows from here and there, it's not quite like any other game we know of. And I remember, when we started the VO recordings, I said to the lead actress, think of the tone here like it's Doctor Who...

"... we can't wait for people to play it."