Nerd Age is extremely proud to announce our interview with Bastion Developer Greg Kasavin. He took some time out of his busy schedule to speak with Nerd Age’s “Scholar”. Greg Kasavin worked on Bastion in the writing and design sections, as well as being the former Site Director for GameSpot.
Scholar of Nerd Age: First of all we want to congratulate you on your Steam release of Bastion. It certainly looks amazing. We’d also like to thank the team for their time, as we asked you during a very busy release schedule.
Greg Kasavin: Thanks in turn for your coverage and for your patience on these responses. We’re now past the initial crush of activity surrounding the Steam launch, and thankfully the response has been great.
Nerd Age:We’ve really got to ask you first about something that blew us away about the game. How did get such an impressive and unique visual style to this game?
Greg Kasavin: Our artist Jen Zee is really at the heart of the game’s art style. She’s the only artist on the team. She joined Supergiant Games at a time when Bastion’s look was still undefined but the tone of the game and the fiction was pretty well understood, so she was able to take those details and create a look that really nailed the kind of atmosphere we were going for.
Right away we want players to feel a pretty stark contrast, where on one hand there’s this rich and vibrant almost-storybook world, but on the other hand you can tell something has gone terribly wrong in that world. We wanted to create an atmospheric game so finding an art style that was rich with detail was very important.
Nerd Age:We’ve heard about the studio itself, but we’d like to hear from individuals. Could you tell us some about what you do, Greg?
Greg Kasavin: Sure! I’m responsible for the story and all the writing in Bastion, plus I built roughly half of the game’s levels. The world design of the game and the characters and so on are things I came up with in collaboration with the rest of the team. This was my first opportunity to work on a game in this capacity, and it’s something I’ve wanted to do since I was a little kid so the experience of it was very important to me.
I often juggled writing and level design tasks while on the project, which was very rewarding. In addition to the time spent writing the narration, the implementation took a lot of time and focus as well, since we needed the timing of the voiceover to feel just right.
Nerd Age:Could you mention any noteworthy individuals on this project? What do some of the members bring in particular?
Greg Kasavin: Supergiant Games is a core team of seven people so each individual on the project was essential to the game. The studio was formed by cofounders Amir Rao and Gavin Simon, who I worked with at Electronic Arts in Los Angeles. Amir served as lead designer on the project and is our studio director. Gavin is our gameplay engineer, and created the game engine and tools we used to make all the content. I’ve also mentioned Jen Zee, who’s responsible for the game’s artwork.
Darren Korb is our audio director, so he composed all the music, created all the sound effects, and conducted countless voice recording sessions with Logan Cunningham, our voice actor. Last but not least is Andrew Wang, who served as our systems engineer and got the game running beautifully on console, and essentially got the whole thing to a shippable state.
And that’s our team. From time to time we also had additional (and invaluable) support from some friends and former EA colleagues. For this project we were based out of the living room of a house in San Jose.
Nerd Age:You guys are more than sort of a big deal now, with the entire industry taking notice. Was it rough getting there?
Greg Kasavin: The response to Bastion has been really great so far. We feel very fortunate to have made something that’s resonated with so many people who’ve played it. Getting to this point certainly wasn’t easy for us, as we put every ounce of our ability into the making of this game. We benefited a lot from a couple of factors:
First, even though Bastion is our first project as a studio, our team has some long-standing connections with each other. As mentioned, the cofounders and I worked together at EA for a while, so we already knew one another’s strengths and preoccupations going into this.
Amir also goes way back with Andrew and Darren and Logan.Those kinds of personal bonds can sometimes be a bad idea when starting a company, but in our case they really helped.
Second, we found that many other independent studios were very willing to share their experience with us as we were trying to find our way. It’s been a really great experience in that regard, getting the time of day from studios we’ve admired for so long, making friends with their teams.
Nerd Age:You spent a huge amount of time on this soundtrack, (http://supergiantgames.bandcamp.com/track/a-proper-story), do you think that amazing soundtracks are becoming the industry standard?
Greg Kasavin: Thanks for the kind words about the soundtrack! I certainly think there’s an appreciation among players for good music in games. The response to our soundtrack has been just incredible – while Bastion has received a generous amount of praise on the whole, the soundtrack seems to be the one aspect of the game that everybody seems to agree on.
In our case, since we wanted to make an atmospheric game with some emotional weight to it, we knew from the start that the music would be key. Darren began writing music for the game quite early in the development process, and his work helped solidify the game’s tone. Our close collaboration also enabled some unique moments in the game where the music comes to the forefront of the play experience.
In direct answer to your question, though, I’m not sure I’d say that amazing soundtracks are becoming standard. I do think many big development teams are willing to pay a lot of money to have talented composers score their games. But I don’t think that’s the same as what you can get having a musician embedded on the dev team, which is why I think smaller studios are sometimes behind some of the best music in games.
I think truly great music in games is due not just to the quality of the compositions but also to the way in which the music is used. My favorite game music, the kind I’ll always remember, is always strongly associated with specific characters or moments in games.
Nerd Age:What in particular about the “action” in this game stands out from among the industry? What will really have an impact with the players in the gameplay?
Greg Kasavin::We designed Bastion around the idea of highly active, nimble-feeling combat, so it’s much more action oriented than most action role-playing games. We wanted to reward player skill and provide players with an ever-growing number of rich choices to make around character customization.
We also tried to do this in a “nonfat” sort of way, by doing away with a lot of the traditionally-complicated aspects of character creation and leaving behind only the essential choices. It was also important to us that our game be 2D. We really miss the crisp, responsive feel of classic 2D games and wanted to evoke that with our game.It also enabled our art style. We’d love to keep making 2D games because we think there’s a certain sensation about them that 3D games have never fully replaced.
Nerd Age:Can you give us a taste of any future projects you will be doing?
Greg Kasavin: It’s too early to say at this point where we’ll go from here, though we have a lot of ideas for the future! I think whatever we end up doing next, we would want the experience to capture the sense of wonder and excitement that Bastion created for a lot of players.
I think we will do everything we can to keep making games that create a palpable sense of surprise, intrigue, and emotional attachment in players, while continuing to put a heavy focus on great-feeling responsive gameplay.
Nerd Age: And finally, what do you have to say to other people in your community who want to make the next big indie game?
Greg Kasavin: Whatever success we’ve had with Bastion I think is due to our team chemistry, our ability to play to the strengths and interests of the members of the team while finding ways to connect those interests into a complete-feeling game.
While some game makers are talented enough to do everything alone, most of us have a hard enough time trying to master a single discipline. Finding good, like-minded collaborators with the same work ethic can be very difficult but I think it’s key.
Thankfully there are a lot of people out there driven to make great games that are different from what’s being sold on store shelves. It comes down to those people finding each other and finding ways to collaborate. Luckily in our case, we were able to do that and make Bastion happen.
And in some respects our story is not uncommon. At any rate, as difficult as it is to make a game happen, I think in some ways it’s never been easier. The availability of free tools and popular digital distribution platforms means many smaller games can find an audience these days if they’re both good enough and their developers succeed at getting the word out.
That wraps up our interview with Greg Kasavin, we hope to cover more beautiful games like this one from Supergiant games.
