Grim Dawn Interview

Rock, Paper, Shotgun had the chance to chat with Crate Entertainment’s Arthur Bruno about Grim Dawn, which recently was successfully funded on Kickstarter and totaled an impressive $537,515. Here’s an excerpt:

RPS: Do you feel vindicated in your commitment to this project by having raised half a million dollars from Kickstarter?

Bruno: Ha, I wouldn’t say vindicated. It’s definitely a confidence booster. Until we actually get the game out and see what the end sales will be, we don’t know. The goal is to set up a small studio and keep producing games into the future. Grim Dawn is the stepping-stone to establishing ourselves. We’re in indie garage mode right now. But it’s feels good, and says that we’re heading in the right direction. There’s a lot of work ahead of us.

RPS: So what’s the roadmap for that work?

Bruno: Development-wise we’re in a very good position. We’ve had a lot of time to lay out the whole foundation of the game, to get the fundamentals, to get a bunch of art sets completed. In one sense the game is very far along, in the sense that is an elaborate and refined vertical slice, but there’s a lot of content to build, and that’s where the new guys come in. And as unfortunate as events surrounding the close of 38 Studios were, it has meant we’ve been able to hire some very talented people very quickly. The guys we’ve hired have hit the ground running, and learned the tools very quickly. Some of them were fans of Titan Quest and had used the tools before. They’re already producing nice stuff. So from here it’s a case of building the world and getting the quests implemented. Our hope is that late this year or early next year we’ll roll out the alpha which will have a couple of hours of game to play and test. Because we’re not working with a publisher we can be flexible about how we roll things out. I guess that’s a Minecraft kind of release, where we get the alpha into people’s hands and they can give us feedback. Then the beta, and eventually I guess we’ll get to that final release. We’ll continue building and developing even after that, however.

Thanks RPGWatch.