Bastion Interview
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Speaking of scope, a strong script is vital for such a ambitious game. How much did you have to write for Bastion? Did you get to use everything that was written? If not, was there something left in the cutting room floor that you'd wish was included in the final game?
I wrote close to 60,000 words for Bastion, though a large slice of this is all back story content mostly for my own reference to inform the rest of the writing. I did all of the in-game writing, both the text and narration. Amir Rao, who's co-founder of the studio, served as my editor, and then once we'd get the writing to what felt like a good place, we'd record and implement, then test it on other people. We heavily iterated on all the writing to make it the best it could be there's a saying that you do your best writing only 10 percent of the time. Cutting and editing is a natural part of the process of getting to good writing, so no, we absolutely did not use everything that was written. And I have no regrets about anything that wasn't used. Everything we threw out, we threw out in order to make the game better. There was no part of the game that I thought was really good that we had to cut, or anything like that.
As the writer, this was really an outstanding process for me I had a razor-sharp editor in Amir, the high-level goal to keep iterating to reach the highest possible quality, and an absolutely great, one-of-a-kind voice actor in Logan Cunningham, who would read the stuff I wrote and nail it time after time. I say half-jokingly that even if I wrote the worst possible trash, Logan could still make it sound good. So yeah, if the story and writing in Bastion aren't well received, I'm pleased to say I'll have no one to blame but myself.
You've probably heard of the quote from Carrie Fisher on how she approached the dialogue in Star Wars that was written by George Lucas. It goes something like (he can write all the (expletive) he wants but I'm the one who has to read it). You took it to another level of editing, having Amir helping you out along the way. Were there ever any moments when you two realized something didn't really sound natural just when Logan was recording his tracks? Did he improvise or ad lib any of his dialogue along the way?
Amir and I would go back and forth on the writing to get it to a place where we felt it was ready for Darren and Logan to record. I would always sound out everything I'd write, knowing that the timing and sound if it mattered more than how it looked on the page. Even still, there were definitely times when we'd do some rewrites on the fly during recording as when Logan would find a more natural way of reading certain lines. There was a little bit of adlibbing as well, as Darren or Logan would sometimes find ways of tweaking certain lines to make them sound better or more natural. Often what we would do was record multiple versions of certain lines, get them into the game, and see which fit the best for the context.
