Popular “living card game” Android: Netrunner will soon be getting its own free-to-play mobile role-playing game, and according to developer Legacy Games, the title’s story is being co-written by 80 Days and Samsara writer Meg Jayanth.

“[Jayanth] is going to help us write the basic story outline and help us get the direction of the story,” producer Jamar Graham said in a recent interview with GamesBeat. “We feel like the narrative is the most important part of why we’re doing this. We want to tell a good story, and it’s something that mobile free-to-play isn’t doing.”

Android: Netrunner is a 1v1 card game currently produced by Fantasy Flight Games, the same tabletop company behind popular miniature games like Star Wars: X-Wing and complex board games like Arkham Horror and Twilight Imperium. The game is set in a dystopian cyberpunk future “where monolithic megacorps own and control the vast majority of human interests.” Yep, the future.

The Android: Netrunner card game shares some similarities with other card battlers like Magic: The Gathering, but rather than forcing players to construct their decks from random card boosters or online resellers, Android: Netrunner includes all of the same cards in each retail set. This makes the game both more affordable for new players and more evenly balanced for people who do not want to spend hundreds of dollars to acquire all of the best rare cards.

With the popularity of the card game, some fans have asked why the mobile game will not be more of a direct translation of the tabletop experience, but Graham said that Legacy Games was never interested in doing one-to-one recreation of the existing game.

“If you were to port Netrunner from card to digital, you’d have to make changes to make it compatible with the digital space,” Graham explained. “That’s why we don’t want to do ports of the tabletop game.”

Graham added, “I think what Fantasy Flight [sic] is that they get a lot of pitches about turning the tabletop games into straight digital versions, and we said that we really just want to use the world and the art. That’s where we see the value, and they’re really enthusiastic about that. And no one has really done that before.”

Photo by illustir