Dear Reader:
Shakedown Hawaii's protagonist not based on Donald Trump, says dev
The main character in Shakedown Hawaii is a real estate agent and reality TV star, which has had some people thinking he is a spoof of Donald Trump. The developer behind the game has released a statement to clear the air.
"I do want to make one clarification though: The protagonist's not a parody of Trump, and was in fact conceived well before that last election even began. I understand the possible confusion since he's described as a CEO / guy on reality TV, but that's not the case here.
The reality TV side of the game was one of those perfect flukes that came out of the Tetris-like process that is melding the desired story beats with gameplay that fits the genre. It grew out of an excuse to squeeze in more video game-y elements like rotating cannons and platforming conveyor belt props into the game's more grounded tone (ie. 'it's a game show'). Originally, you played a secondary character on these shows (a younger, fame hungry kid), but the second character didn't keep the game on-theme with the business satire, and I wanted to keep it more focused and on point, so I rewrote it to have the main protagonist compete on the shows instead. It wound up working out much better, actually, and was another lightbulb moment of magic!
It's been a challenging game to build - riffing on these business things would've been a snap with a point and click adventure game, or in Seinfeld episodes, but making it work in this open world action/shooting context was a long process. I had to organically unearth a bunch of these 'ah-ha!' moments where the blocks fell into place, but it sure felt good each time they happened!"