Brenda Romero on board game design influencing Empire of Sin

Game developer Brenda Romero has also had experience designing board games and analog games as well, and when we talked to her at Gamescom in Cologne this week, we asked how this experience influenced Empire of Sin, a project which she is leading as the game director.

"It goes back, as you mentioned, to my experience with board games," she confirmed. "Every game I've worked on, every game that I've certainly been lead of, I have made a board game of it first, or an analog game."

"Now, with Empire of Sin, we actually had a team meeting where we got together and I said 'you're in Chicago, it's 1920s at the beginning. What do you want to do?' And so we had sort of a pseudo-D&D session where people in the office are talking about the things they hope they could do, how do I as the DM respond to that, and that sort of stuff saves a lot of money, because there's no code prototyping involved. And some of the ideas, some of the strong ideas that are in the game today, come as a direct result of doing things like that."

"I think, even though computers aren't involved in board game design, because it's all exposed, you are forced to be pretty structured with the mechanics and how those things work, because players need to understand them, they need to understand them easily, and what you're seeing needs to have very deep systems, or great interaction between each other to develop the breadth of play that you'd hope you would get."

For more on Empire of Sin be sure to check out the Gamescom trailer showing off even more of the gameplay, as well as our extended interview with John Romero back at E3.

Is this board game influence evident from what you've seen?