Shadowrun Returns Interview

Harebrained Schemes will apparently return to Kickstarter to fund another project at some point, at least according to what Mitch Gitelman told Gamesindustry.biz in a development-oriented interview on Shadowrun Returns. There’s not a lot of info on the game inside, but instead we get a “behind the scene” look at the whole crowdfunded development process:

While Shadowrun Returns isn’t the only Kickstarter game to miss its originally planned release date, Gitelman doesn’t believe these crowdfunded projects are running into operational difficulties at a rate any different from normal game development.

“It’s one thing to make a game for a publisher where it’s very secret until you finally announce it X amount of weeks or months before ship when you want to get the rolling thunder of marketing going,” Gitelman said. “It’s another thing to make a game in a fishbowl where everybody can see everything you’re doing. And a lot of what I see on other Kickstarters are production difficulties or issues that happen on almost every game, except nobody knows it because it’s not so much in the public eye. I think there’s an element where you don’t really want to know how the sausage is made; you just want to know it tastes good.”

Some crowdfunded projects have taken that level of transparency up a notch, and invited backers into the development process itself in a variety of ways. Gitelman said the Shadowrun Returns team made a conscious effort not to have backers giving direct input in the game, a decision that he was surprised didn’t get much negative feedback.

“I expected that, but it really hasn’t happened that way on Shadowrun Returns,” Gitelman said. “Truthfully, our backers have been great. … I think what’s happened is we set the tone pretty early in our Kickstarter. It was a fairly conscious decision on my part. We’ll listen to feedback and then we’ll make intelligent decisions, but we don’t solicit it.”