Transistor Interview

GameRanx has published an interview with Transistor’s creative director Greg Kasavin on the game’s narrative, RPG elements and combat, with a few more subjects thrown in for good measure. Here’s a snippet:

It definitely does. It [Transistor] is similar to Bastion, but it is also extremely different. Bastion is very pastel-colored and bright, more fantasy-based. This [Transistor] is a little darker with shadows and darker colors. Was this an idea that resonated with the entire team from the beginning?

Greg: I think we naturally wanted to make a game in response to Bastion. In a lot of ways Bastion, for us, was an exploration of the action RPG genre. We really wanted to make an action RPG, but we knew we weren’t going to make a game like Diablo, because we would just make a worse version of Diablo, right? We needed to find our own angle on this so we ended up with the narration and the action-oriented combat. So with Transistor, we really had a lot of fun making the weird fantasy world of Bastion, and we wanted to see if we could do it again with more of a science fiction theme starting with a sort of cyberpunk atheistic, as the genre trope, and then proceeding to twist that in hopefully interesting ways. also taking the gameplay in a more strategic direction, in which we found fertile ground for a deeper combat system which was something appealing to us.

One thing I love about the combat is that it varies so much depending on the player. If someone wants to make it a hack-and-slash they can, but there is also a heavy strategic element to it. Would it possible to go through the game without using the time-pause ability?

Greg: Yeah, that’s kind of the idea. Whether you’ll be able to avoid it entirely, I don’t know. The idea is that we want you to be compelled to use it on your own terms so we aren’t going to force it on you. We want the real-time combat to be fun and viable; having this really powerful ability opens up this opportunity for us in terms of designing combat and encounters with enemies, stuff like that. To make them really intense because you always have this option to say ‘˜No, no, no, wait. Time out. Now I’m going to turn the tables on these guys. I’m going to take these guys out, do that..’ and we find out that players use it in very different ways that’s when we felt that we were really onto something. Not everyone was just using it every single time, because we didn’t want to make just a straight-up turn based game, because of the things we wanted to do with the narrative and our desire to make an immediate-feeling game. We wanted to capture some of the sensation of turn-based games and the drama of contemplating your next move and the anticipation of pressing the go-button and seeing whether the plan is going to happen or whether it is going to screw up. Those are fun moments for us.