Expelled! Interview – inkle’s Jon Ingold Talks Creation, Morality, and Community

Gossiping, lying, stealing, and manipulating – but hopefully not expulsion – are in the cards with the recent release of inkle’s Expelled!

Garnering rave reviews and making an appearance at the happening Day of the Devs event, Gamers Heroes recently spoke with inkle’s Jon Ingold to learn more about how Expelled! came to be.

Expelled! Interview – inkle’s Jon Ingold Talks Creation, Morality, and Community

Gamers Heroes

I’m really thankful for your time today!

I did get a chance to check out a little of Expelled! – and have gotten expelled a couple times. I absolutely love it –  I’ve thrown lots of books out of windows! It’s a very cheeky tale. 

How did this world come to be?

Jon Ingold

The ideas come from lots of different places, and are sort of glued together.

The very first inspiration for Expelled! is Overboard!, which we made four years ago and was inspired by Agatha Christie and Death on the Nile. It’s about a woman on a boat who pushes her husband out into the sea and tries to get away with it. 

And yes, it’s cheeky and it’s fun!

I knew I wanted to go back to that world, along with that kind of gameplay. We were looking around for settings that have the right feel.

It’s almost like a comedy show; you want a bunch of people trapped in an environment they can’t get out of rubbing up against each other. You want to make it fun, and you want all the petty rivalries and petty jealousies to escalate and make things bigger than they would.

I was thinking about settings that would work for that. Around the same time, I was talking to my aunt about her time at school quite randomly, and she told me a hilarious story about a teacher in the days she went through in the 1940s.

I can’t remember the story anymore; it fell out of my head after I spoke to her. And then she passed away, so I couldn’t ask her.

I thought “maybe if I could write this whole game, my brain will dredge up this nice conversation I had with my aunt.”

While I still can’t remember it, that was one of the inspirations was this sort of family connection.

Mostly I was drawn to a setting where you have teenagers that are impetuous and kooky. They make quite bad decisions for strange reasons, and that makes them really fun characters to interact with in this freeform gameplay style that the Overboard! games have.

There aren’t very many boundaries – you can do what you like. When you mix it up with teenagers, you get quite an interesting breadth of possibility!

Gamers Heroes

That leads me to my next question…

Starting out, I was a goody-two-shoes. I wanted to make sure I did no wrong, but then I got expelled. 

The game actually said as much, saying I should be a little more cheeky. 

Are there any patterns that you noticed throughout testing, or certain choices that rose to the top? 

[spoiler]

I can tell you my time with Owl when you really insult her – I love that! I got expelled, but I felt great.

Jon Ingold

What we found is that players are split very keenly into two groups. 

There is one group who are out to solve this problem, sort out the situation saying:

“I don’t care what I break or who I hurt or how I do it. I want to get to the goal.”

We didn’t need to tell them twice they were choosing the kind of transgressive, naughty options from the beginning and finding their way down to the bottom of that pit straightaway.

The other half played like your experience, where they kind of go:

“This stuff matters – I want to be a good person!”

That scene you mentioned with the Owl was added quite late. We started to notice there were testers who just weren’t getting this concept. One of the principles of the game is partly that it’s quite fun to do things like that!

It’s a bit of a commentary: If you’re a girl in the 1920s from a poor background,the rules are stacked against you. You can’t play by the rules if the rules aren’t fair. 

That’s something we wanted to say with the game mechanics. 

We added that scene with the Owl to help people who were struggling to think, “Is it okay to do this?”

It’s not just that people are good or bad, naughty or kind. 

It’s that when people play games, they want to play them correctly; they want to play the game right and not play the game wrong. 

Games come with this expectation that you’re supposed to be a good person, that’s sort of what we’re expected to do. 

You have to teach the player that that rules don’t apply. In this case, being good, being Paragon, is a different kind of game. 

We really had to spell that out, and I think we found a way to do it that was quite fun to do – and I also think it works. 

We do get a few people who plug on regardless, trying to be a good person, and they find the game really hard.

Gamers Heores

I definitely appreciate that – mission accomplished!

Verity is a truly fantastic character – Amelia Tyler does such a great job with the voice work. What was it like working with her?

Jon Ingold

Amelia is amazing! She’s super fast and never stops thinking. 

You give her the script, and she’s reading it out, and then she’s riffing on it, and then she’s going, “Wait, no, I want to try it this way!”

Then she’ll go “Well, what if we said this,” or she’s just in character; you’ll be talking to her about how we’re going to record this section of dialog, and this is what’s happening to the character and she’ll start being in character, improvising.

There’s actually quite a lot of bits of dialog in the game which weren’t in the script at all, but are just straight ad libs that she just came up with.

It’s a bit like you’ve been inside the house, and when you open the door on a sunny day – the sun just blasts!

Gamers Heroes

This can be seen as a spoiler, but do you have a favorite character in Expelled!?

Jon Ingold

Oh, I love them all!

Gamers Heroes

It’s like picking a favorite child!

Jon Ingold

The character that’s the most fun to write is Fifi Vaudeville. She’s kind of your arch nemesis, she’s so over the top, and she takes everything so seriously. 

Normally, when writing a character, you quite often will write a line of dialog that you think is quite funny and think: 

“No, that’s too much, that’s too far; I can’t do that!”

But not with Fifi – she thinks that she’ll say it. She has some wonderful rants and speeches that were so much fun to write.

But it’s hard to call her my favorite character because she’s such an awful person…

I think my favorite character is your roommate Natasha, who is also a very over-the-top character. 

She’s this sort of tragic Russian, someone from a Tolstoy or Dostoevsky novel. She’s got some funny secrets as well that come out as you play the game more!

She’s much nicer, a much more genuine person!

Gamers Heroes

Is there anything else you’d like to add? It’s a true honor to speak with you – I’m looking forward to diving in post-GDC. 

Jon Ingold

It’s been a real joy having players explore this world!

We’ve been building it for a year or so, and it’s so full of secrets, jokes, little things you can do, and hidden corners. 

It’s been really fun watching people on our Discord server putting things together, solving little things around the edges and working out how things fit together. 

That’s been a real delight!

Launch is always a great time for a game, but it’s been particularly satisfying watching this one get out there and reaching people.

Expelled is available for the PC via Steam, Nintendo Switch, and iOS.

Feeling social? Be sure to connect with inkle via their official Twitter/X and Bluesky social media accounts, along with their Discord channel.

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