Shadowrun: Hong Kong Interview, Part One

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has published the first part of an interview with Harebrained Schemes’ Mitch Gitelman and Jordan Weisman about Shadowrun: Hong Kong. The interview focuses mostly on the developers’ past experience with Kickstarter, how it compares with the current campaign they’re running, and the evolution of their pipeline and game engine from the original Shadowrun Returns release. Here’s a couple of interesting snippets:

RPS: You’ve hit a bunch of the stretch goals already how representative are the sums you tied to them of what the extra stuff will actually cost? Or is it ‘˜well, we’ll do something?’

Mitch: That was our first Kickstarter [laughs]. We made that one up as we went along. Now that this is our third successful Kickstarter, we did much better planning than on the previous ones. Every single thing in our stretch goals is part of a product plan, part of a budget we put together, saying that if we’re gonna hit this we’re going to need this much money. We really did our homework.

…

RPS: The impression I got from the first Shadowrun Returns was that it was almost stuck on the fence between being a roleplaying systems game and a narrative game. By this point how much more sure are you about what it should be first and foremost?

Jordan: No, our goal was always to have very rich narratives. That’s what excites Mitch and I, we love that storytelling. I think as you said though, the challenge was that we needed to build a strong backbone to the engine and we knew we wanted strong tactical interaction, but we were also developing this editor so that players could develop their own stories. That is something we were excited to enable, because Shadowrun as a tabletop RPG has always been about everybody being able to tell their stories, not just us. It’s a shared universe. But we frankly underestimated how much extra load that was going to be to do, to create a releasable editor. So the time for us to tell our story got shorter, so what ended up in the first Shadowrun returns was maybe 40% of what we had already written. That’s also why it was more linear than we intended.

Mitch: Sorry, it was actually 25% [laughs]. I went back and did the maths.

Jordan: Yeah. And all that’s a matter of learning your engine and learning your tools, so when we went back to do Dragonfall we are able to tell a much richer and less linear story.

Mitch: And now that we’re doing Hong Kong, we’re building on that experience again. Besides building on all the great features that went into the Dragonfall Director’s Cut, and all the changes that we made and the upgrades that we made, our process for creating these stories and these characters has evolved. We’ve got sort of a toolset for how to come up with the stories, which makes it much easier for us. It got much, much faster.