Shadowrun Returns - Dev Diary on Berlin DLC

Couchpotato

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Harebrained Schemes has a new update for Shadowrun Returns. The main topic concerns the Berlin DLC, and gives us all a status update.
Design: For the last few weeks, Trevor and Kevin (our designers who did the bulk of the level design for the Seattle campaign) have been prototyping a variety of gameplay ideas for missions. We want to create meaningful choices for the player within scenes. As an example, Kevin’s working on a run against a corporate facility with several possible ways for the player to gain entry depending on their party’s skillset. The choice of approach isn’t always clear cut, however – one path may allow the player to slip in undetected but at the expense of some innocents. We’re also working on some more unique non-combat elements – the other day Trevor created a dog character in the Haven area that you can interact with and get to follow you around.

Systems: In between their work on the other big-ticket dev tasks, the engineering team’s been able to complete some fun new features for us to use in Berlin. We now have the ability to display important mission data directly in the game’s UI. This makes it easy for us to communicate custom mission objectives (For example, the number of rounds before reinforcements arrive, # power junctions remaining, etc.) Another cool new toy is… exploding barrels! Because… video games. (Actually, our engineers went above and beyond with this feature and now we can make any actor explode with any type of effect or damage, and even leave behind damage-over-time effects on the tiles in the area.)

What’s Next: This week we’re shifting from pre-production to production. I’ll be finalizing our story with the design team, along with Jordan and Mitch, to make sure we’re constructing this campaign on a strong foundation. We’ve flowed out a schedule from now until the end of the year so that we can budget our production time appropriately. The environment team is moving from concept art to full tileset production on our Haven location. Our story is being broken out into discrete mission outlines, with each designer taking the lead on a set of missions. Kevin’s created a great “mission doc” template that we’ll use not only to document a clear set of goals for each mission, but also to track feedback and important hotspots for our test team to pay attention to. Our next milestone as a team is to construct a full first-playable of our Haven neighborhood, with the player able to explore the area, talk with the locals, buy equipment, and maybe complete a small side objective or two – then return to their base to get to know their team. This will establish a strong template for both the Haven location and the characters in it that we can build the rest of the experience on.
More information.
 
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It's probably heresey but I just could not get into Shadowrun. It has everything I like in game mechanics.. but it is just not grabbing me. I was thinking maybe some fan content would get me excited.
I am gonna go back to it today and try to finish-- and perhaps my Dwarf Adept will get me excited.
definately the minority opinion-- I know
 
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Was a very good game and HBS works lightning fast. Ideal game developer also from finishing projects on time standpoint.
 
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It's probably heresey but I just could not get into Shadowrun. It has everything I like in game mechanics.. but it is just not grabbing me. I was thinking maybe some fan content would get me excited.
I am gonna go back to it today and try to finish— and perhaps my Dwarf Adept will get me excited.
definately the minority opinion— I know

I understand that, I've played a few hours and it didn't really grab me either.

I would like to go back and finish it but right now there are other games in my backlog that are more interesting.

It's probably the setting I'm a big fantasy guy, although I did really enjoy XCOM.
 
SRR didn't grab me either. Finished the main quest then tried a UGC (which imho was better) for a little while but then stopped and have no urge to return. It didn't help that it wouldn't run on my main rig so I had to play it on the work laptop and my forum post regarding it got no official response.
 
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Feb 3, 2011
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I had a blast with Shadowrun Returns. Story was superb, characters were nicely fleshed out. Only downsides it was linear and relatively short. It was like playing a lite version of PsT. I'm really looking forward to this new module. Introducing with great dragon Lofwyr would be nice.
 
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I really liked the story. Skills and combat were bit shallow.
But the lack of proper save system is big problem for me.
 
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Mar 15, 2010
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great game if a little short. I still haven't got my hands on the toolset.
 
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I really liked the story. Skills and combat were bit shallow.
But the lack of proper save system is big problem for me.

This...with an emphasis on the shallow character development.
 
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