The Banner Saga Interview
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Here's a snip:
Indie Game HQ: What are your plans for the extra money raised?
Alex: Any time you start making a game there's a flood of great ideas and you have to scale that back to what you can afford both in terms of time and money (often these are interchangeable). The most valuable thing the Kickstarter funding let us do was bring back the best ideas that we had to drop before. We've added a ton of content including dozens of unique characters, we've been able to dramatically expand the amount of story content and re-playability in the game, and we've improved the quality of everything throughout. Before we were going to be doing our own foley and writing our own music and we've been able to get really professional studios to pitch in with us including Austin Wintory, the composer for Journey. These are all things we never could have gotten anything close to before.
Indie Game HQ: How much of the complete game can people play in the beta?
Alex: Right now, beta is specifically focused on combat, which was our biggest and most complex system. Even in our early state of beta we've got a ton of stuff happening in the game and a lot of subtle systems in combat that seem to be pretty unique to The Banner Saga. As we developed the single player game we thought it would be a lot of fun and help us develop the game if we just opened up this combat system for anyone to play. A small studio who has no budget for marketing has to find other ways to get people excited about the game, and making the combat free and competitive is a great way to do that.
As we keep developing systems and characters for the single player game we'll be adding that content into Factions which I think will really help with the quality of the game overall.
