Under a Red Sky: How Transistor Came to Be

Destructoid has published a four-part making of interview with the developers of Transistor, the recently released indie action-RPG. The first part deals with the tail end of Bastion’s development and the very start of Transistor’s, the second with the game’s combat design and influences, the third with the game’s art direction and the fourth with its soundtrack. Here’s a brief snippet on combat design:

“The joke I have is that we don’t ship with the game. So if we have to stand there and explain how to play…if we have to explain it now, when are we going to make it explain itself later?” Kasavin said.

“You have to be introspective when you’re watching people play,” Rao said. “And all those moments when you want to grab the controller from the player are actually a failure on your part to design something that encourages the kind of behavior that you’re looking for. So at PAX, it’s a lot of what we observe [that serves as useful feedback]. Sometimes more than what people say about the game.”

“We really like it when we can just observe and we don’t have to intervene. We see intervention as a failure,” Kasavin said.

“We don’t intervene,” Rao said. “You need to see if it will resolve itself otherwise you ruin your experiment.”

“We have these moments where we’re like cringing, ‘oh god, this person…’ We blame ourselves. But, oh god, this guy, you know, this person just is not seeing this thing that we thought was noticeable but it’s not. They don’t know where they’re going. Then they have their epiphany and it’s like, oh thank goodness,” Kasavin said. “If we can see this many people get through it and learn the system successfully, then we can go back home with the confidence that we can move forward from that foundation.”

“We often talked about how if we were just making a straight-up turn-based game…like if we made things more difficult for ourselves by trying to do both, but we felt, for us, it was really key to do both,” Kasavin said. “So much of it is letting players discover these options for themselves instead of ‘you have to use this’ in certain situations.

“That means making the real-time mode very viable and even better in certain situations. For us, that’s exciting during development, even in high-level play, stuff that we haven’t talked about. New game plus, like super late game there are situations where resolving a fight can be preferable in real time with certain power combinations. … Then you have people who are much more straight ahead in a strategy game. Every time they can go into planning mode, they use it. Every time the cool down is up. They play it more like turn-based game.

“Everyone can enjoy strategic thought even if they don’t consider themselves into strategy games. When they’re watching a baseball game, everyone’s the armchair coach. They know exactly what everyone should be doing. People have an intuitive sense of strategy. And also just the drama, the anticipation, of ‘okay, here’s what’s going to happen when I hit go,’ and then watching the resolution of that. And nine out of ten times it goes how you want and one out of ten times it kind of blows up in your face and you have to deal with it.