Shadowrun: Hong Kong - Interview @ RPS

Alec Meer of Rock, Paper, Shotgun has published the first part of his new interview with Harebrained Schemes to talk about their new game Shadowrun: Hong Kong.

RPS: Obvious question, but why Kickstarter again? Did you actually need to?

Jordan Weisman: We went back to Kickstarter because for two reasons really. One financial and one emotional. We really had a spectacularly positive experience working with our backers on the creation of Shadowrun Returns, Dragonfall and Golem Arcana. In all those experiences, our backers were really fantastic resources and sounding boards, and cheerleaders during development, which can sometimes be gruelling and dire. Having an excited audience with you during that process both makes the game better and makes it more fun to make.

Mitch Gitelman: Our backers would buy us pizza when we were working late, and they would buy us bagels when we were working the weekends.

Jordan: Sometimes in game development you’re sat they’re slaving away, and you’re like “does anybody give a damn?” Here, we had people with us throughout the entire experience, responding to our ideas, helping us hone them and being such positive supports. This Kickstarter’s very different than the other two, where we really asking them to help us fund the entire experience. Here, through being fortunate that the games have sold pretty well after we brought them out, we were able to fund a very good size Shadowrun Hong Kong ourselves. But there were a number of features which our budget didn’t allow us to add, and those were what we brought to the audience and said ‘if you guys would like these features added to the game and content and this additional material that we weren’t able to fit in our budget, please chip in.’ It really became a co-funding proposition, which is very different from what is traditionally done in Kickstarter.