What Is Inklets? A First Look at the Three-Player Sketchbook Climber

Inklets is a multiplayer mobile climbing game where three players race up the same living sketchbook page while black ink rises from below. The last climber standing wins. It is being made by our small indie studio in Zug and is planned for iOS and Android in Summer 2026.

That is the one-paragraph version. This post is the longer one: how a match actually plays, how you create your own character, what the Sketchbook is, and what joining the waitlist gets you.

The premise: a living sketchbook page

Everything in Inklets looks like it was drawn in a notebook, because in the world of the game, it was. You play a small ink creature, an Inklet, climbing an endless page of sketchy platforms. The page is not on your side. Platforms wobble, slide, spike, and snap. Ink smudges drift into your path. Page monsters wander in. Chaos events reshuffle the climb when you least want them to.

And below everything, the ink is rising.

How a match of Inklets works

Every match puts you on the same page as two other players. The loop is simple to learn:

1. Jump. Bounce from ledge to ledge before they slide, stick, spike, or snap, while the other climbers race beside you.
2. Dodge. Smudges, monsters, and chaos events try to knock you off the page.
3. Grab coins. Shiny detours tempt you sideways while the lobby climbs past you. Coins become unlocks later, so the risk is real and so is the reward.
4. Outlast. The ink keeps rising. When it swallows a climber, they are out. Last Inklet standing wins.

There is no finish line and no score to grind. Survival is the whole rule, which means every decision is relative to the other two players: take the safe line and fall behind, or risk the cracked platform to stay ahead of the ink.

Lobbies are three players, matches are short, and the game is built mobile-first, so the controls amount to quick jumps, climbs, and dodges with one thumb.

Create your own Inklet

The character you climb as does not have to come from a roster. The AI Inklet Generator is built into the game: you describe a small character in a short prompt, the game draws it in the sketchbook style, and you equip it and jump straight into a race.

The flow inside the app looks like this:

• The main menu keeps your selected Inklet, your best time, and the next run one tap away.
• The lobby shows who you are climbing as, who else joined, and the last-one-standing rule before the countdown drops you onto the page.
• The create screen pairs your prompt with a preview of the generated Inklet, and one button equips it.

Base characters like the Voidling are there from the start, alongside skins like the Barrel Courier, Box Kid, and the Sleepy Paper Bat. But the lobbies we enjoy most in testing are full of player-made oddballs. If you are curious how prompt-based creation compares to traditional character customization, we wrote a deeper piece on AI character creators in games.

The Sketchbook: what you keep

Coins and wins feed into the Sketchbook, your collection of everything you have earned: climbers, skins, page backgrounds, platform styles, trinkets, monsters, stamps, stickers, and rare Inklets. Rewards do not just sit in a menu; backgrounds and platform styles repaint the climb itself, so your collection changes how every run looks.

The Sketchbook is big enough to deserve its own post, and it has one: inside the Inklets Sketchbook.

Release date, platforms, and the waitlist

The practical details, as they stand today:

• Platforms: iOS and Android.
• Release window: Summer 2026. Waitlist members hear from us first as the window gets locked.
• Launch mode: competitive last-player-standing climbing.
• Price: free to download at launch.

One more thing about the waitlist. The first 100 confirmed signups receive a launch-only collectible skin that we will never draw again. It lands in your Sketchbook on day one and stays there as proof you were early.

Is Inklets for you?

If you grew up on vertical jumpers and always wished they were properly multiplayer, Inklets is built for exactly that wish: the survival tension of the classic climb, shared with two other people, on a page that fights back. And if you have ever wanted to play as something you imagined rather than something you bought, the generator is the other half of the pitch.

The waitlist is open now at inklets.app. We are a small studio drawing a strange little game, and we would love to have you on the page when the ink starts rising.