Shadowrun Returns Interview
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EGM: Can you tell me a little about the project's inception, its start leading up to the Kickstarter, during, and, of course, after?
Jordan Weisman: We had been wanting to do Shadowrun for a long time. I had tried to pitch a kind of larger-scale game with publishers unsuccessfully, due to the restrictions on the license and publishers not wanting to take up property that another publisher owns. So it was kind of laying dormant, because we knew it was out of the scope of what we could do ourselves at the time the studio was Mitch and I and eight other people, and we were totally just bootstraps. We didn't have any kind of significant development budget available, so it was laying over dormant until we saw Tim [Schafer's] success and said, (Alright, let's go give it a shot.)
We had developed this level editor for Crimson: Steam Pirates, which we thought could be extended to Shadowrun, and we thought we could eventually release that editor so that people could create their own content, their own stories and adventures in Shadowrun. And the top-down view would make that simple because, you know, developing 3D levels is beyond most people. But the top-down nature would make that accessible. So that's what we went out and talked about, and the response was so overwhelming that the budget went up to almost five times the original budget. We ended up with a lot more money than we thought we were going to have, and so the scope of the game grew dramatically. So did people's expectations. People's expectations grew higher than the budget allowed, and that was kind of a continual thing for us, to try and manage those expectations, because by videogame standards the end budget is still very modest.
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In the same vein, is there anything that didn't make it into the game that you were really trying to get in or really couldn't quite get right?
Weisman: Many things. Probably the one that's the biggest is our save game strategy that's something we've taken some hits for. As we looked at what we were trying to do, the power and the trigger system could create very, very sophisticated behaviors, but it also meant that the state engine was really disseminated. And so the ability to do instant saves was going to be really, really hard if we wanted to put all that power in the hands of the player all the level generators and our own internal level generators as well. It's not that it's an unconquerable problem, it's just an unconquerable problem within the time and budget that we had to do both. We chose to go with the content creation power, not the instant saves. Certainly we knew that was a very tough choice at the time, and I still thought we would have made it giving the power of the creation but I think we could've done a better job of informing people about how the save game works, because the game doesn't even tell you. It's a rude surprise.
