Bastion Retrospective Interview
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Come July 2021, a whole decade will have passed since the launch of Bastion, Supergiant Games' debut action-RPG famous for its unique visual style and gruff narration. And in order to celebrate the anniversary, Game Informer has put together a series of articles dedicated to Supergiant’s games. The first one is all about Bastion and how it came to be.
Here’s a few sample paragraphs:
Bastion started with Rao and Simon just passing ideas back and forth and taking scans out of D&D books to use as placeholders. Rao was a huge Diablo II fan and Simon loved The Legend of Zelda series, so the pair wanted to make something that was a cross between their favorite games. “We just talked about games and games we loved,” Simon says. “We just seemed to have a lot of the same thoughts and interests about everything and it rolled forward from there.”
Things really picked up when Zee joined and got straight to producing assets. “There was no pre-production on Bastion,” Kasavin says. “It was ironic to us, because it was a game that was celebrated for its artwork, and people would be like, ‘Oh, do you have an art book? I’d love to see an early concept of all this stuff.’ But almost everything [Zee] did went straight into the game.”
After working at a company where she needed constant approvals, Zee welcomed the challenge. “The feeling that you have ownership and accountability over the entire process is super empowering,” she says. “It’s also very scary, but right off the bat, I was given so much ownership. It was just really nice, and it was very clear we just needed to get stuff done.”
For composer and audio director Darren Korb, learning the process took some time. “For me, an effective way to learn something is to just jump in,” he says. “It quickly became apparent that what I thought might work [wouldn’t]. For instance, I was trying to do something ultra-realistic at first. It’s just like, ‘Well, what does it sound like when you hit a box with a hammer?’ And it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s not the thing you want it to sound like in a video game.’”
