Supergiant Games Podcast Interview

The Tone Control Podcast, hosted by Fullbright (Gone Home) co-founder Steve Gaynor, recently had a chat with Supergiant Games’ devs Amir Rao and Greg Kasavin, and luckily for those of us that don’t have a great love for the format, Paste Magazine has posted a transcript of a part of the chat:

Gaynor: Did the idea for the game come before the company?

Rao: All we had when we started Bastion was the idea of an action RPG in which you build a world yourself. What that was going to mean was something that kind of came later. The thing we often say is a lot of the stuff that was cool about Bastion came a lot later we just started building a prototype where you had a hammer and I modeled the guy in Blender and we scanned the enemies out of D&D books and we stole art from Nintendo games and just put it together until it was something. And we’ve shown this prototype before. It was really fun. We showed it at PAX East like a year after the game came out. It was just interesting to show people.

Gaynor: I saw it in your talk at IndieCade. Greg had shown some screenshots of Bastion when there were beholders.

Rao: Yeah, so some of those guys became exact enemies in Bastion, some of them are like 1:1 and some of them are not. There is a guy in there called the Mudman and he was awesome in the first week of development. He became the scumbag. He was goopy and he dropped stuff and he was big and slow and dumb. Stuff like that was great and showed the promise of what we were doing but the really special stuff came when we found people to do those additional things the style of the game, the style of the music, the writing, additional design elements, Logan’s voice. Those are things that kind of evolved. We had no documentation when we started, and we as a studio culture have very little documentation as we go.

…

Gaynor: So something as a developer that I really respect about what you guys are doing is it has a lot in common with Bastion but also obviously very much its own new thing. So what is your summation of what Transistor is? Like what’s different and makes it its own thing?

Kasavin: I mean, we assumed nothing going into it, which was interesting no constraints, or whatever. The way I like to think about it is like Bastion was our exploration of the RPG genre, like we wanted to make an action RPG because we really love that genre and it seemed rich with opportunity. And having made Bastion we felt that there was still like a lot of rich ground there. But at the same time we were interested in going in some totally other direction on it.

Rao: The constraints were the preoccupations that people were thinking about at the time. It’s like, (Ok if we want to go into or talk at least about the more strategic, tactical direction.) But, you know, Darren has musical preoccupations, Jen has artistic preoccupations, and they also both have like gameplay and design preoccupations that they’re interested in too, so it’s like, (Can we kind of knot it together?)

Kasavin: Yeah, we wanted to leverage what we felt we could do well, obviously.

Rao: And like, stuff they’re excited about trying in a game, that they want to put in a game in an interesting way that they haven’t seen in a while or they haven’t seen before.

Thanks, RPGWatch.