![]() The process of building the game for other platforms was approached with care. It was helpful for us to learn that the game could speak for itself.” We did not expect the kind of reaction we got, but it made us really until it’s ready, there’s no reason to have to talk it up. “We were just blown away by the response. The arduous journey turned out to be well worth any hassle. The first four hours were fun, like a road trip, and then it was like a million more road trips that just kept happening and never ending.” We got in, so we all got into a van in San Francisco and drove all the way to Seattle, which was a terrible decision in retrospect. Validation came for Rao and the rest of Supergiant in September 2010, when Bastion debuted at PAX. “We entered the PAX 10, which is a contest that they have at PAX Prime where they show independent games. We’re always aiming for that complete experience where everything is working together and in concert, and I think the way you get that is you build it up slowly over time.” I think that does mean we often layer stuff on, that we build over time,” Rao explained. “You often don’t know what the game needs until you’ve built the thing. “Ideas need to be of a scope that we can very quickly try them and iterate on them and make them into something better than what the original idea was. At Supergiant, that awareness has bred a team that is willing to experiment frequently, until things can fall into place. To put aside the baggage of being a game’s developer and step into the mindset of the player. There’s a basic understanding of the fact that the best way to gauge the quality of a work is to actually play the thing. In many ways, this speaks to the overall philosophy at Supergiant. I think the combination of those things is what made Bastion work.” It’s not like there was a big game design document super-clear articulation of the vision, but there was a lot of threads running through that we wanted to try to deliver on. The music came straight out of Darren ’s early musical noodlings on trying to make something that sounded like what we were going for, tonally. “Our 2D style came from when we hired Jen. ![]() “A lot of what was special about Bastion actually came… when we tried certain ideas, like the reactive narration,” Rao recalled. Some of the game’s most popular elements didn’t come until after this happened. Adding new minds and new perspectives to the project bred different ideas. ![]() The game fleshed out slowly as the Supergiant team grew naturally, organically. It was a really simple idea that we just started building on.” “We wanted to build an action-RPG in which you could sort of build the whole world yourself. “ Bastion started with a really simple idea that had nothing, I think, to do with why it was so well-received,” Rao continued. “It was just two of us to start, before we added our audio director and our art director… and all the other people who worked on it. “We started in September of 2009 and we developed the game and developed the game and developed the game,” Rao said. This is a game that gestated for nearly two years before reaching release readiness. For us, that’s why it took a long time to do each version of Bastion.”Įven just the initial work on Bastion took time. “It’s a huge challenge, thinking about how you imagine your games across all those different interfaces and how you can put the same creative energy into solving the problems of each. “We focused most on making feel right for each place we put it,” Rao told us in a recent interview. “Port” is something of a dirty word at Supergiant the content-complete iOS release took time to develop because of the premium placed on nailing the interface correctly. Summit last week in which he spoke directly to his team’s philosophy on cross-platform development. Studio founder Amir Rao delivered a talk on “Multiplatformism” at the 2013 D.I.C.E. The delay is attributed to Supergiant’s attitude toward ports. The team took a full year to re-develop the game for iOS after its summer 2011 launch on XBLA and Steam. Ports aren’t exactly unusual, but Supergiant’s delivery method was. The game was originally released on Xbox Live Arcade, but has since made its way to PC/Mac and iOS platforms. No, the thing that sets apart Supergiant Games’ beautiful action-RPG is its very existence on multiple platforms. Not the “clever indie hits it big” aspect you can expect that to happen at least a few times every year. Bastion is an unusual success story in gaming.
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