Bastion Interview
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Previously members of your team were working at Electronic Arts. What have been some of the challenges of transitioning to running your own indie studio?
AR: While at Electronic Arts in Los Angeles, we were on a really great team, but it was a really big team. Getting anything to happen took convincing a large number of people and a fair amount of management.
On this small team, if someone has an idea, you can see it in the game in four hours. That means we can try a lot of things, like this idea of having narration, and iterate really fast. While they are managing a lot of things and there's a lot of risk, we are small and can be nimble. We can try more things, which makes it exciting.
GK: We have been able to push ideas that are aesthetically appealing, even if they're difficult to rationalize. The kind of game we're making we never could have pitched on paper. The idea of a game where an old man talks to you the whole time sounds terrible, but hopefully when people try it out they have a very different experience.
How would you describe your creative roles at Supergiant Games?
AR: I do a lot of the level design for the game and I run the studio, doing business and management stuff. They are not correlated roles at all. One part is really, really fun, and the other part is. less fun than that. It involves a lot of going to the mailbox to get and pay bills.
GK: I provide the writing for the game. There's a heavy narration component, and all that I write. I design the fiction behind the setting and the enemies you encounter. Since we're a small team, pretty much everyone gets to muck around in just about everything. We're not really super compartmentalized.
