Transistor Q&A

Supergiant Games’ creative director Greg Kasavin fielded a series of questions from the Shacknews community, offering some insight on Transistor and its development cycle in the process. Here’s a snippet:

brickmatt asks: I’m fascinated that you’ve used essentially the same crew to make a similar, but also totally different game. Do you try and come up with roles for everyone, and that steers the design? Or do you come up with the design, and see what roles folks could play?

Kasavin: Our goal after finishing Bastion was for the seven members of our team to stick together and make something new, and that’s what we ended up doing with Transistor — adding several key new members to the team along the way, so we’re at 12 people now. For sure our games are configured around the strengths of the people we have on the team. A good example in Transistor’s case is the significant role of the music in the game. Darren Korb, our audio director, is a musician by background, and having worked together successfully with his friend and vocalist, Ashley Barrett, on our first game, he was interested in doing something more with songs and music for this next project. We took that into account when formulating the fiction, and so forth. While we try to think big, we also try to work within our means, and make games we think we can make well.

pyide asks: How much thought and work went into the ability system? The sheer number of combinations, and how anything can be used as the active skill, modifiers, or passives?

Kasavin: The ability system in Transistor came together after lots of iteration, as we wanted to create an interesting and deep system to extend the moment-to-moment play experience across the full duration of the game. While we tried a lot of things there, the idea we eventually pursued was the one we felt would take the most work to get right — but it was the most exciting idea to us! A goal of the system was to reward experimentation without forcing it. At the same time, we wanted to deliver on the idea that you’ve got this mysterious and powerful weapon, and provide an open-ended system that aligned with that. It was a lot of fun creating and playing with all the different permutations of abilities that we could think of, and watching different players use it in some wildly different ways.