Shadowrun: Hong Kong Dev on Kickstarter Experiences

USGamer writer Mike Williams has chatted with Harebrained Schemes studio head Mitch Gitelman about the company’s three successful Kickstarter projects (Shadowrun Returns, Golem Arcana and Shadowrun: Hong Kong) and the process of getting something funded on Kickstarter in general. There’s a lot of interesting information about Harebrained Schemes’ current philosophy and their mistakes with the original Shadowrun Returns campaign in the piece. Want an example? Here’s how Harebrained Schemes attempted to make up for its own mistakes:

“We did over-promise because we didn’t know any better,” he says. “Things went so fast. In order to keep the momentum going, we just kept coming up with cool new ideas which we really liked, but we had no idea how to deliver them at the time. In order to live up to what we said we would do, we killed ourselves for a year. We worked very, very long hours. Jordan and I worked most weekends in order to meet those expectations. We weren’t making promises we didn’t think we could deliver. We fully intended on delivering everything. We killed ourselves and we couldn’t deliver everything.”

The inability to deliver on every promise is what led to the creation of the Shadowrun Returns expansion Shadowrun: Dragonfall. The $1 million stretch goal for Returns was an additional city and a backer poll chose Berlin as the location. When it came time to add Berlin, the team realized that getting Berlin in-game on schedule was going to be impossible. Even the launch of Returns itself was delayed a few months. The key for Harebrained was not only letting fans know early, but also delivering more than promised.

“We figured if we were going to disappoint people, let’s over-deliver. That why we’re here today. That commitment to living up to what you say you’re going to do,” says Gitelman. “The overwhelming consensus [about the delays] among our backers was ‘Take the time you need to ship something great.’ It wasn’t super-stressful. We were a little nervous about putting out the updates that said that.”