Kenshi - Eight Year Development Journey @ Siliconera

Chris Priestman (Siliconera) talks with developer Chris Hunt about the eight year development journey of the sandbox sqad-based RPG Kenshi:

Kenshi’s Eight Year Development Journey From One-Man RPG To A Team’s Success

Kenshi has been in development for a long time. Eight years, in fact. And it’s no wonder: the majority of it is the work of just one person, Chris Hunt, and the game is scheduled to be absolutely huge. So what is Kenshi? It’s a harsh, open ended RPG that relies on detailed sandbox play rather than a linear structure.

Your primary goal in Kenshi is to survive. And it’s not made easy as the other characters in the game will not be intimidated by you as you’re not a fated hero. You’re just a regular nobody trying to get along with your life. And so it’s possible that bandits will kill you in a village raid, that you’ll be mugged, or you may even be turned into a slave at any point if you let an attacker get the better of you. 

For the past couple of years, Kenshi has been gaining popularity on Steam Early Access, and due to that the progress it’s been making has accelerated as more money means more time and people can be thrown at it. Siliconera caught up with the game’s lead Chris Hunt to talk about how he got started working on Kenshi, why he undertook such an ambitious project by himself, and where the game is now heading with its latest updates.

To start with, could you give a brief history on the development of Kenshi – how it got started, how long it’s been in the making, and who’s working on it?

I started work on Kenshi around eight years ago now. For the first five or six years, I worked alone on it full time whilst juggling a minimum wage security guard job during the nights to get by. It’s been in the works for a long time, mainly laying in the fundamental systems and getting it into a playable state. But it’s finally picking up pace now that it’s on Steam Early Access and I can afford extra manpower. During the last two years I’ve managed to grow a small team – Sam, our first programmer; Oli, our world designer; Natalie, our PR contact & writer; Otto, our 3D & concept designer; and Maykol, our second programmer.

What would you say is the concept at the center of Kenshi? What kind of experience does it offer at its core that you won’t find in other games?

It’s a mixture of genres: an open world RPG, kind of like Skyrim (very very loosely speaking), but with RTS elements of squad control, base building, research and crafting.

I’ve never liked the hand-holding that most of the big RPGs give the player where you’ll start off a hero, strong from the very beginning, nothing to fear. In Kenshi you start out as a normal runt with no special powers, no higher stats. You are not special, you are nothing, and even survival itself is a struggle. You’ll be bullied, harassed, caught up in the war of another faction… maybe you’ll even get caught up in a bandit raid while resting in the ‘safety’ of a town.

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