Shadowrun Returns Post-funding Update #41

A new Kickstarter update for the successfully funded and concluded Shadowrun Returns campaign surfaced today, and it’s a new developer diary penned by Jordan Weisman. Here’s just a snippet to give you a taste:

When you net out all the costs of Kickstarter, Amazon/PayPal, Microsoft (for the license), the production cost of our Backer rewards, and the picking, packing, and shipping cost of those rewards, we have just under $1.2 million to actually spend on making the game – which is amazing compared to our modest initial plans but nothing compared to today’s 100-million-dollar RPG behemoths – but that’s ok because we have two secret weapons!

The first of these powerful weapons is what I call (The Infinite Resolution Rendering Engine) an incredible piece of biotechnology developed over millions of years, capable of presenting the audience such vivid imagery so real they can smell and even taste it. Yes you guessed it, it’s the gray stuff between your ears and the imagination it is capable of. We can’t afford to put everything in our imaginations onto the screen, so instead we decided to put it into your imagination via (theater of the mind). By combining beautiful environments and characters with cleverly-integrated text, we hope to inspire you to (see) and (hear) things that we could never afford to put on your screen or out of your speakers.

Shadowrun Returns integrates text into gameplay in four ways:

• Chapter and Scene Introductions set the context and emotional landscape for the scene you are about to play
• In-world GM pop-ups describe the sights, sounds, and smells that your character is experiencing at this moment. For those of you who are unfamiliar with tabletop role-playing, GM stands for (Game Master) – the person charged with setting the stage and refereeing the action. 
• In-world character speech bubbles provide short quips from your characters and our NPCs, providing insights into their actions. Of course, sometimes, they’re just for entertainment. 
• Our conversation window allows you to have in-depth branching conversations with characters in the world, as well as GM narration that helps bring those characters to life. (Although we can’t animate the single tear traveling down the street urchin’s face, we can type it!) 

These theater of the mind tools can be used in really inventive ways. Trevor King-Yost, one of our designers, put together a wonderful little sample game which combined an old school movement puzzle and classic text adventure using a combination of character movement, word balloons, and the conversation window. The team broke into spontaneous applause when they saw it.

Our second secret weapon is . . . YOU. Shadowrun started as a tabletop RPG in which we provided players an interesting world and rules for creating characters and stories within that world. Of course we loved to tell our own stories in that world and published lots of source materials, adventures, and novels in it but the key driver of Shadowrun’s success over the last 24 years is the creativity of its Game Masters and their players. It was a primary mission for me to extend that creative outlet to the digital world. Thus a cornerstone of Shadowrun Returns, from inception, has been to release our content development tools so that you could tell your own stories.

When we started our Kickstarter campaign, we envisioned a true top down game (like we had in Crimson: Steam Pirates) because that’s what we could afford with the budget we posted on Kickstarter. But it was clear from the first day that this was not what you were hoping for you wanted more depth and immersion. So we decided that an isometric view was necessary to deliver what a top-down view couldn’t provide.

While I’m happy with that decision, the art and engineering involved in constructing a rich isometric world is expensive! It’s definitely added development challenges over the course of the project but we’re really proud of what we’ve managed to accomplish in our isometric game world.

Over the last eight months, we have invested a great deal of time and money into creating an editor powerful enough for us to tell the stories we want and (hopefully) accessible enough for you to wield its power and tell your stories too.