Planned Release Date: October 2026

About This Game

Inkbuster is a cozy organization game about closing up an 80s video rental store after hours. You scoop up piles of VHS tapes with real tentacle arms and sort over 10,000 of them however you want. No timer, no score, no way to lose. Just you, nostalgia, and a store that slowly comes back together.

Don't worry, you have 8 arms.

There are over 10,000 tapes on the floor of this shop. Grabbing them one at a time would take forever, so you don't. Each tentacle is a real arm you aim and reach with, so you can scoop a whole pile at once, dump it in your cart, and slide tapes home while the shelf shuffles over to make room. Once you get in the rhythm it's super satisfying.

Every cover is procedurally generated. No generative AI.

There are 600 unique movies across 16 genres, all made using procedural generation and open-source word banks. This mattered to me enough that I built the whole pipeline from scratch, and it is included in-game as a custom movie-maker where you can generate or create your own movie titles to be used in the game. This is not some vibe-coded asset flip, I poured myself into this to try to make it special.

The cart is your buddy

You get a shopping cart, and it turned into one of my favorite parts of the game. It follows you around on its own, waits while you work, and has a whole set of cute little animations. Vacuum tapes straight into it, pull them back out when you're ready to shelve, and yes, you can upgrade it too.

Sort it however you want

A lot of tidy-up games have exactly one correct order and buzz at you until you find it. Not this one. Tapes must be grouped by genre and series, but the actual shelf they go on is up to you. The shop is yours to organize.

No two shops are the same

Every new game scatters the shop fresh from a seed, so the pile is different every time. And if you want to mess with it, there are controls for how the tapes spawn, so you can do huge clumps or completely scattered.

And then there's all this

• A full upgrade system. Earn more arms, hold more tapes per arm, a bigger cart, and cart-specific upgrades too.

• A wall of every movie you find. Hidden in the piles are one-of-a-kind display copies. Pick one up and it lights up and flies to the wall, filling in your collection one rare find at a time.

  • There are 600 to find. No rush, they turn up while you tidy.

• Collectibles tucked under the mess, including cassette tapes that add to the shop's soundtrack.

• Make your own tapes. There's a full in-game maker for building your own movie covers, and Steam Workshop support is already in, so you can share them and stock your shelves with the community's stuff.

• Play your own music through the shop and watch the lights sync to it.

• Little minigames to find and play while you tidy.

• Steam achievements that print into posters you can hang on the walls, stamped with your own stats from the run.

• Speed-run modes with a built-in split timer and separate Any% and 100% categories.

• Your own cozy corner to decorate, with slots to build a little living room in the shop that's just yours.

Made so anyone can play it

Accessibility by design. Genres are told apart by shape and brightness, not just color, so the game stays readable for every kind of color vision. You can tune the size and font of the text, and every single sound has its own volume slider, so turn the plops way up and the music way down, whatever your ears want. There are comfort options for motion and screen effects too.

I'm also working on Simplified Chinese for launch. Chinese covers are regenerated from Chinese word banks and profanity filters, so I am considering paying a service for all the other player facing text.

Have fun!