Bastion Interview

PaweÅ‚ Durczok has put online an in-depth interview with Supergiant Games’ creative director Greg Kasavin and artist Jen Zee, and it goes without saying that a good chunk of the questions would concern their upcoming action-RPG, Bastion. Obligatory (and generous) excerpt ahead:

PD: You are all long-time gamers, but with rich history in the business. Now that you don’t have the guys is suits watching over your shoulder, how does that influence your creative approach to the development process?

GK: Our creative process benefits from having fewer cooks in the kitchen in general, and also because all of us on the team have a long history with different games despite having rather different backgrounds. One of the clearest benefits of having a small team is that we can make decisions faster, and the ideas themselves don’t need to be over-documented or over-vetted. If we have an idea for a feature, we can get it implemented on a base level often in the same day. This type of rapid iteration lets us get to good results quickly.

As far as the creative process itself is concerned, we’re critical enough of ourselves where I think we can effectively filter ourselves while still being very willing to try unconventional ideas. In fact our process is to always try new solutions first before falling back on conventional solutions to design problems. In this way, not only do we sometimes happen on interesting new ideas, but we also gain a healthy respect for certain design conventions since we never take them for granted.

PD: When creating Bastion, how did you approach it? Did you say (Hey, I would love to play an action RPG with a narrator), or was it more like (Hey, you know what people might like to play. an action RPG with a narrator). What I’m asking is more of personal project, or a commercial endeavor?

GK: While Bastion was always intended to be a commercial endeavor, to use your term, we think that commercial endeavors can also be personal projects. We invested most of our creative energy into the game itself in the belief that there exists a large enough audience out there interested in playing high-quality, original games. We didn’t even really know our identity as a studio at the beginning of the process. We just needed a context to make games our own way, and as Bastion started taking shape, so did our identity.

As far as the game itself goes, we love action RPGs as a genre but felt they were relatively underexplored. The game started as just a germ of an idea. The narration aspect didn’t happen until a few months into the prototyping process. There was no design document, just the thought of making a 2D action role-playing game that would explore the positive feelings around returning to town in other action RPGs. The fiction and other aspects of the design naturally extended from there. We did know early on that we wanted the game to have some sort of a narrative component, some sort of emotional weight that made it more than just a fun experience. At the same time we didn’t want to interrupt the play experience for the sake of the story. Our reactive narration allowed us to achieve these goals.

PD: I’m a huge sucker for 2D games, especially with hand-drawn graphics. I always found them more elegant. They also give a lot more creative freedom, and Bastion’s art style very much benefits from that. Why did you decide to use that type of graphics and what were the influences behind the style.

GK: We wanted to make a 2D game in part because we missed the feel of classic 2D games, which offer a sense of immediacy and precision that most 3D games still struggle to achieve. We also wanted to make a game that was easy to pick up and start playing so we weren’t interested in teaching the player how to manipulate a 3D camera we’d come from working on real-time strategy games where 3D cameras were a constant struggle.

It took a while before we found our art style, but as soon as we saw it we knew it was what we wanted. The art style is the work of Jen Zee, who joined Supergiant Games in April 2010. By then we had a good sense of the kind of tone we wanted to achieve, and knew enough about the game fiction and characters we wanted to have, so Jen was able to take those details and visualize them. There are no one or two influences on the art style though we get some very flattering comparisons, sometimes to games like Final Fantasy Tactics or VanillaWare games like Odin’s Sphere and Muramasa. Jen created a look that aligned with the tone we wanted.