One of the features being spotlighted in the Kickstarter campaign is having a living, breathing city. Is it just about immersion in the game world that excites you about it most, or is it the gameplay possibilities?

I think the gameplay possibilities actually build the immersion. If the player performs a certain action in the world, you want, and would expect, to get a realistic response from the simulation of the population. Whether the player views these reactions as positive or negative will really depend on your play-style, but we’re careful not to force any morality into the impacts of your actions. We feel a realistic reaction to your actions will help build the immersion more than forcing certain play-styles down the players’ throats.

I love that, as playing in a world of grey can be a lot of fun. Speaking of your living world, the way missions are delivered to your character promotes interacting with the npc's and your environment to a great degree. I love the idea of discovering people and missions as opposed to being delivered them, as it gives you a credible reward for exploring your surroundings. Can you go into a bit more detail as to how that will work?

A little bit like an RPG but without the time consuming workload of rigid scripting. We want the players to discover the missions and objectives in the world. You can physically make the hacker break into a competing corporations office and uncover some tidbits of information that reveals a new objective or goal in the world, or bribe an informant or guard for information.

You’ll also have the option of paying for information on the black market; there’ll be places in the world where you can go and just pay someone to find the information for you. The other option is to pump some of your money and income into data mining which over time will hack into any systems in the city and give you drops of information as it finds it. All of this information will be presented to you in communication between people, emails, memos, etc.

It really seems like there are a ton of ways to interact with the world you've built, and while we're talking about the surroundings, it should be mentioned I absolutely love the art style you've gone with. Also, your soldier designs are pretty damn cool. It's gotta be hard creating a soldier or guard that doesn't look like every other soldier or guard. Any behind the scenes details on how that style was created? I'm a sucker for that kind of thing.

We have an amazing group of concept artists we contract for that. We gave one particular artist a fairly loose direction for a faceless corporate soldier that is somewhat reminiscent of Stormtrooper and his initial “rough” sketch completely nailed it first go.

You've recently added the digital novella written by Russell Zimmerman to your rewards list, who has plenty of experience with cyberpunk worlds. Is that a prequel to the story of the game, or something that takes place during?

We’ve only just brought him on board so our plans haven’t been nailed down as of yet. The universe we’re building has existed for over a century under the control of the current corporate power, so there’s going to be lots of room for Russell to stretch his legs. Whether or not his novella will directly set up the events of the game or stand on its own is still yet to be decided.

A novel gives you an ample amount of room to flesh out the world, so is there one particular part of the fiction that you wanted more room to develop?

We’re careful not to box ourselves into story elements that will dictate things for the long term. If we’re successful with this first game, we want to leave ourselves some room to explore the world beyond the one city Satellite Reign will be taking place in. Are there other cities out there? Other corporations? We want some freedom to explore in the future.

Well it's safe to say I'm convinced, and thank you for taking the time to speak with me Brent. Congrats on being over halfway funded with 20 days still to go! I sincerely hope I get the chance to play Satellite Reign, and look forward to seeing more of it.



Thanks for talking to us!

If you're interested in finding out more about Satellite Reign, or just want to donate, you can head to their official Kickstarter Page here.