Bastion PC Patch Released and Interview

We have a couple of news items for Supergiant Games’ Bastion, starting with the release on Steam of a new patch, the highlights being fixes to “several issues reported by players” and the compatibility for eventual fan translations in certain previously unsupported languages. Here’s the changelog:

– Fixed an issue that caused Secret Skills to sometimes become unselectable after successive play-throughs of the game.

– Fixed an issue that could cause the Man-at-Arms achievement not to unlock when expected.

– Fixed an issue that could cause weapon upgrades of the same tier to both become selected in the Forge.

– Fixed an issue causing Bastion.exe to not exit cleanly as intended.

– Added custom language support for alphabets based on Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic, in support of requests for player-created text translations to other languages. To add a custom language to the game, follow these steps:

– Determine the two-letter language code according to ISO 639-1

List of ISO 639-1 codes

e.g. Portuguese = pt, Russian = ru, Polish = pl

The following example is for creating a Russian (ru) translation.

– Navigate to SteamsteamappscommonbastionContentGameText, and make a copy of HelpText.en.xml called HelpText.ru.xml.

– Translate the text in HelpText.ru.xml from English to Russian. At the top of the file, make sure the line reads:

– Create a folder in SteamsteamappscommonbastionContentSubtitlesru

– Copy over the files in SteamsteamappscommonbastionContentSubtitlesen, and translate them.

– Launch the game with ‘-lang ru’ Launch Options

We also have an interview with creative director Greg Kasavin (here’s the first part, here’s the second) subjects being, among others, the artistic style of the game, why “the Kid” was chosen as the main character by the team, the differences between being published by Microsoft and Valve and whether the developers are planning an expansion or DLC for the title. Here are some excerpts:

Why is Bastion so saturated?

That speaks to the kind of contrast we wanted to create. Technically, it is a post-apocalyptic setting but it feels bad to even describe it that way. We did want it to have this storybook-like quality where people feel a sense of wonder. It’s both to make the world feel captivating from the beginning from a gameplay standpoint to get players hooked but also was thematically important.

We wanted players to feel sort of conflicted about the world where even though you had the sense that there’s been something like a terrible loss, what’s left is still pretty nice. We wanted players to feel attached, and making it beautiful was one way to do that.

I’ve read before that the backgrounds were hand painted…

Yeah, that’s correct. It’s a fully 2D game.

Then my curiosity is how were the sprites created?

A lot of the sprites like the main character are based on 3D models that have a hand-painted texture to them. The animation frames are still spat out as sprites so technically there isn’t a single polygon in the game. The only reason we used 3D modeling is because we only have one artist on the project and doing 10,000 frames of animation by hand would not have been bloody likely for us to pull off.

Our goal was to give it a cohesive and 2D look. Going for a 2D game was one of the first decisions we made. It [2D] has a certain look and feel to it that I don’t think 3D has ever been able to fully replace. We miss some of the feel like that.

(…)

So, Dungeon Siege III has come out which is an action RPG, but on the Live Arcade, you have Bastion and Torchlight. Dungeon Siege is $60, Bastion and Torchlight are only $30 combined. How can a casual market stay away from buying the two for $30 and letting the $60 one fall to the wayside? Is that a problem with the industry in general?

Ultimately, I think this type of competition is good for customers. Prices are dropping and quality is going up. It does create a challenging environment for some developers as prices approach zero, which I think is something that has been popularized on iOS. You can get some pretty great games for $0. If, over time, the expectation takes hold that games should cost nothing, that would certainly be problematic.

Some have cracked that with free-to-play business models, but that model is not compatible for every type of game. In a game like Bastion which has a fixed amount of content with a beginning, a middle, and an end but it’s not based around a grind, the free-to-play model would not make sense. Personally, for $15, the game was a great deal and I’m glad we didn’t charge any less for that.

Even with a team of only seven people, we still need that kind of money and a sufficient amount of sales in order to keep making games independently. This project was self-funded. We don’t want to take money from publishers so we can keeping making games our own way.

The industry is changing a lot and prices are continuing to drop. I think the guys who are charging $60, they’re probably the most nervous. I would be if I were them. That’s part of the reason we’re not doing that anymore, myself and the co-founders of the studio worked at Electronic Arts, one of our engineers used to work at Infinity Ward, so we’ve been there. Those games are under tremendous pressure to deliver both the content and the quality that these small downloadable games are not capable of.