Harebrained Schemes - Interview @ N4G

The N4G Blog continues the indie month, and posted a new interview with Mike McCain. He is the Art Director of Harebrained Schemesm, and Game Director for Dragonfall.

FOGKNIGHT: How was Harebrained Schemes born?

MIKE: Jordan and Mitch officially founded Harebrained back in 2011. There were about a dozen of us, starting out - some folks that had worked with Jordan at his previous venture, and a few new contractors like myself. We were working out of a storage closet we rented from Gas Powered Games. Literally! It was this tiny, L-shaped closet on the far side of the lobby. There, we created our first title - Crimson: Steam Pirates, an iPad game published by Bungie Aerospace. Next up was Strikefleet Omega, a realtime fleet–command game for mobile which broke a million downloads and was very well received by both players and reviewers.

Our big breakout moment as an independent studio, though, was the Kickstarter campaign we launched for Shadowrun Returns in spring 2012. After that success, we more than doubled the size of the team and moved to a larger office in Kirkland to accommodate (which is where we still are today.)
 
FOGKNIGHT: What is Harebrained Schemes' goal as an independent game studio?

MIKE: Well, at the end of the day, we want to always be making games we love. We're passionate about telling great stories and entertaining an audience, so storytelling and world-building is always a part of what we do. We want to stay small, making games that appeal to a core geek audience. We're not limiting ourselves to RPGs, though. We have a very nimble dev team, and it's important to try new things as creators.