Shadowrun: Hong Kong Update #8, $586,098 and Counting

The latest update for the Shadowrun: Hong Kong Kickstarter campaign includes a short blurb from Harebrained Schemes’ designer Kevin Maloney, who’s currently busy working on the campaign’s central hub and wanted to offer a glimpse at the process. Quoting from the update:

This time around, I get my chance to create the Hub Content – in fact, I’ve already started! So far, it’s just a bus stop with a few crew members in their placeholder appearances plus a collection of triggers needed for basic hub operations, but I’m looking forward to building out the rest of it! So, how do you design a Shadowrun Hub? It all starts with the story – everything we create is in service to that. Once the writers – in this case, Andrew and Mitch – have a good sense of what’s going to happen and why, the artists and designers work together to determine the size, look, and feel of the hub in the editor. Then, between us all, we iterate on it over and over, revising and tweaking until we have a layout with a real sense of place and clear locations for all the people we want you to meet.

Developing a hub doesn’t stop there, though. In order to make it feel rich and exciting, there are shops to be filled with items, small quests to be developed, and side characters to be fleshed out. The hub will continue to evolve all the way up to the end of production, as we get in the last bit of polish.