“Development has become a spectator sport.”
That’s InXile Entertainment founder Brian Fargo, referring to the Kickstarter-fueled process that brought the studio’s just-released Wasteland 2 to life. “You have a lot of people [looking over] your shoulder questioning everything. You have this open dialogue of what you’re doing all the time and you have to be very careful and front facing with your communication.
“You also need to be careful with what words you use. I used the word ‘social’ one time and it was like a four-letter word with extra letters. That’s different than what you have in the typical publisher relationship.”
Fargo founded InXile in 2002, not long after another studio he founded – Interplay Entertainment – was acquired. Interplay developed a reputation during the ’90s as one of gaming’s premiere creators of RPGs. It’s the studio that birthed the first Wasteland, as well as Planescape: Torment, another classic that’s found new life on Kickstarter as Torment: Tides of Numenera. For that one, Fargo was able to bring in former Interplay colleague and Planescape creative director Chris Avellone as the writer.
Avellone explains that keeping lines of communication open between developer and player from the start actually transforms the ever-important quality assurance process. It’s much more helpful to spot unpopular ideas early on than it is to catch them once the project is in beta testing.
“Knowing about a feature the community doesn’t want two years before the final product is done sets countless man hours free,” he says. “My first experience with this was working on the vision document for Wasteland 2, and I was pretty scared. But the public received it well, received it great, in fact, and being able to share a vision doc with the public is something almost unheard of in the traditional game development models I’ve been part of in the past.”
