Shadowrun: Hong Kong Post-funding Updates #27-29

It’s been a while since we last checked the Kickstarter page for Shadowrun: Hong Kong, and since then Harebrained Schemes has released three more post-funding updates for the project. Update 27 covers rewards fulfillment and therefore isn’t of particular interest to us, but both update 28 and update 29 are behind the scenes write-ups the first is a general “state of the game” update and the second covers the game’s animations that are well worth a look.

A snippet:

Design

Tyler and Connor have completed their first and second passes on most of the side runs in the game, except for the crew’s personal missions. We want Andrew to get more time writing and exploring the crew before we start making those. Kevin has been busting on new Matrix gameplay for quite awhile now and all is going according to his cunning plans. Exciting stuff there. Trevor has taken a fresh look at all the spirits and drones in the game and is completing work on all our new crew abilities. He’s also driving the new interface features and updates we’re implementing.

Writing

Andrew and I have had the toughest time on the project so far. While I was managing the Kickstarter campaign, Andrew completed a detailed story outline. Once we had focused time together, we realized that our story was too complicated to tell within our time budget. We decided to step back and reassess our basic assumptions so that we didn’t end up with some sort of (Frankensteined) version of our story. When this proved to be a more time-consuming than I was comfortable with, I called in Mike McCain, the Game Director of Shadowrun: Dragonfall, to lend us his editorial perspective. I’m pleased to report that the process worked and we have a story we’re happy with. Andrew is now hard at work, happily writing dialogue and consulting with the designers on their runs. Huzzah!