Today I have an interview about the game Axon Punk: Overdrive, which is currently on Kickstarter. Colin Kyle , the lead designer, answered some of my questions about this cyberpunk, hip hop game set in 2085 megacities! Check them out below.
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Tell me a little about Axon Punk: Overdrive. What excites you about it?
I am so excited about Axon Punk for many reasons. The top thing I’d say is that I get to work with so many interesting and different people. I originally began the game with my brother two years ago for fun and to help us get through some tough times, calling ourselves the Wrong Brothers. When we decided to get really serious about the game, we reached out for help. One of the key people that responded to us was Keisha Howard, who is the leader and founder of the Sugar Gamers and is working on a similar cyberpunk game called Project Violatea. Because of our shared love of games, sci-fi, music, storytelling, and many other things, Keisha began collaborating with us to refine, polish, and share Axon Punk with the world. Since Keisha joined the project, we’ve expanded the team to include a huge range of people – artists, musicians, writers, game designers, and people too hip for labels – that all add their own perspectives to the game. Managing a team of almost a dozen people across the continent, split primarily between Chicago, IL, and Dallas, TX, has had its challenges but it is absolutely worth it. Because we have this team and explicitly incorporate ideas from different perspectives in the game, we are putting together something that is exciting, authentic, immersive, and greater that I ever hoped it could be.
What themes of cyberpunk and hip hop are you aiming to bring together in Axon Punk, and how do they conflict and come together?
One of the foundational themes of hip hop that we wanted to stress above almost all else is the sense of community and connectedness. Hip hop frequently focuses on uplifting people and bringing them together to survive inequality, poverty, and systemic oppression. While cyberpunk absolutely supports the “us vs. them” themes in hip hop, cyberpunk stories often follow disillusioned loners who are isolated by technology and society. We deliberately inverted that trope and built a world where you can only hope to survive by working in groups and depending on your neighbors. Focusing so much on the communities in the megacities in which the characters live gives our cyberpunk a great grassroots feel that players really connect with. In Axon Punk, your motivation during play is to help your neighbors, build your community, and try to change conditions in the megacities for the better.
What are the base mechanics in Axon Punk like, and how do they support the themes?
The United Church of Tupac |
What inspired you to combine hip hop and classic cyberpunk?
We were also heavily inspired by the work of Saul Williams, who blends hip hop, poetry, and cyberpunk into beautiful, raw, and socially progressive music. Deltron 3030 and the Gorillaz were also hugely influential. From a visual and thematic viewpoint, we drew immense inspiration from the anime series Samurai Champloo, which expertly mashes up feudal Japan with hip hop, and Cowboy Bebop, which combines space bounty hunters with jazz.
How did you playtest and work on the game early on to develop the concepts?
Splitting the development process between these two approaches was quite challenging. We had to rework many parts of the game repeatedly until we found the right balance that worked for both styles of play. As difficult as it was, this development process was extremely beneficial and we would not have created such a robust, immersive, and authentic game without it.
For example, constantly running games for new people at cons forced me to have very streamlined rules and play materials. I wanted a big hip hop influence in the game from the beginning, but running at cons limited my ability to dig into the flavor and setting during a game and things started off pretty generic cyberpunk publicly. Having the campaign playtest, on the other hand, let us stew over ideas and playtest things that I was not comfortable exposing to random people at a con. The world that we developed in that at-home campaign is what ultimately lead to the final setting and rules of Axon Punk. It took a lot of deliberation to take our personal campaign setting, which was full of hip hop influence, and make it the default world for the game (as opposed to something more generic or “crowd friendly”). But, because we had this successful campaign where we were able to flesh out ideas for things like “The United Church of Tupac” for months at a time, we had the confidence to really embrace and push the hip hop influence in the game publicly. We started asking for help, adding team members like the Sugar Gamers, refining the rules, playtesting at cons using the hip hop inspired communities in the game, and haven’t looked back for one moment since.
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Thanks so much to Colin for answering my questions about Axon Punk: Overdrive! Please take a minute to check out the Kickstarter if the interview piqued your interest, and share the interview with anyone you think might like it!
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