Shadowrun Returns Q&A

Jordan Weisman fielded some questions from Gamasutra concerning the development of Shadowrun Returns. It’s a fairly interesting, even enlightening look at a Kickstarter-funded title’s development, though don’t expect to see the design of the title discussed:

The Kickstarter campaign hit its $400,000 goal in its first day, then hit $1.8 million in the end. How did you spend that extra money, and how did your studio reconfigure and adjust to accommodate that extra funding? If a campaign gets excess funding, how should a game developer handle that?

Jordan K. Weisman: It was an amazing and very emotional experience during the Kickstarter campaign as the fans opened not only their wallets, but their hearts, writing really touching emails and posts about how the various versions of the game had impacted their lives.

As the backer funding climbed, so did our expectations, and the audience’s expectations for the title. So while the scale of the topline funding went up by almost a factor of five, the expectations went up even higher. I mention (topline) in regards to the money raised, because what most backers — and many crowdfunded studios — don’t really think about is the difference between the money raised and the resulting development budget.

In our case the deductions were: Kickstarter and Amazon’s share, Microsoft’s royalty, the production cost of all the physical rewards (books, t-shirts, boxes, dog tags, etc.), and the cost of picking, packing and shipping all those rewards. When you add all that up it represents over 35 percent of the money raised.

At the time of the Kickstarter campaign, the total studio headcount was only 10 people, which would have been fine for the much more modest Shadowrun game that the $400,000 represented, but nowhere near what the team needed to execute the expanded vision. Over the last year we have grown the studio to a total of 35 people, including full-time employees, interns and contractors.

Building a team is alchemy. You may convince yourself it’s a science, but it’s really magic. And having to scale a team to over three times its original size while under a very tight timeline and budget was a real high wire act which I would not recommend doing if you can avoid it. Mitch [Gitelman] and I have been running studios for decades and so we should have known better then to attempt it — but with the quality and dedication of our team members and some luck we pulled it off.

It was a little over a year between the end of the campaign and your launch. That seems…quite efficient, despite a minor delay. What’s your advice to independent studios who are working towards a deadline for a crowdfunded game?

JKW: In the scale of video game development, our budget was very small and we felt that while our backers were amazing, their patience would not be infinite, so for both reasons we knew we needed to move quickly. We embraced a very agile development methodology which really worked due to the extremely collaborative nature of our studio.

We had some pretty solid, larger design goals established, things like capturing the essence of the pen-and-paper mechanics, player character creation with a high diversity of character archetypes, team based tactical combat, and most importantly powerful [user-generated content tools. But the thousands of decisions needed to realize those goals were mostly worked out in real time over short sprints and with high iteration to allow us to attempt something, and then quickly rev it until it worked the way we wanted it to.

This process means that scope is constantly changing, most often downward, but not always, as the team constantly identifies things that were not considered previously, or that need to be reconceived. The biggest example of that is how we approached the Matrix. We felt that we did not have the budget to (do the Matrix right,) so had early on decided on an abstract mini-game to represent the Matrix and we communicated this to our backers. But after several attempts at that abstract mini-game had failed we finally bit the bullet and implemented a real Matrix experience.