Greg Kasavin, Writer and Creative Director of Bastion

With Bastion taking the gaming world by storm, we caught up with Greg Kasavin, writer and creative director at Supergiant Games, to find out a little more about the studio and inspiration behind the world of Bastion.

Could you start by telling us a little about Supergiant Games and the team that worked on Bastion?

Supergiant Games is a small studio based out of the living room of a house in San Jose, California, and Bastion is our first title. We discovered our identity as a studio through the course of making this game, when we decided that we really want to be making the kinds of games that spark players’ imaginations like the games they played as kids. If you’ve ever seen the movie Ratatouille, there’s the part near the end where the hard-assed food critic takes a bite of the food and it’s like he’s transported back to his earliest memory of a great meal. It’s more than nostalgia. We want to make the kinds of games that have a comparable effect on people.

I met our studio co-founders Amir Rao and Gavin Simon at Electronic Arts in Los Angeles on the Command & Conquer franchise, where we collaborated on C&C3 and Red Alert 3. We all left one after the other in August of 2009, and Supergiant Games was formed about a month later as Amir and Gavin dropped everything to move into that house and hunker down on their first game. Eventually the team reached its grand total of seven people, including Darren Korb our composer and audio director, Jen Zee our artist and art director, Logan Cunningham the voice of our narrator, Andrew Wang our systems engineer, and me as writer and creative director. We’re a pretty specialized team. The game simply could not have happened, or at least would have been very different, were it not for each member’s individual contributions.

There is a very unique feel to Bastion, if you had to sum it up in three words what would they be?

The exact feel and tone of Bastion were important to us from the outset of the project, and boiling it down to just three words isn’t easy, but how about something like: Bittersweet frontier wonderland.

Bastion has been very well received by the press. How did it feel to ship a game to such a rapturous response?

What can I say…? It feels great having garnered this kind of response to the game. It’s still kind of surreal for me. Speaking personally, I’ve wanted to work on games since I was a little kid. Bastion isn’t the first game I’ve worked on, but it’s the one that most closely reflects my values as a game player. It’s also the first game I’ve been able to work on as writer and level designer, and represents the first time I’ve been able to tell an original story through the medium of games. On top of that, my background is in the gaming press, where I worked for years as a game critic — I have a deep-rooted respect for game criticism so the critical response to this game was important to me, almost as important as the response from all the players out there.

That’s a long way of saying, I had a lot invested in this. But at the same time, it’s strange — there wasn’t a specific moment of elation for me, maybe because the dust hasn’t settled on our launch yet and we’re all still waiting to see how it all pans out. But really I just want to do this again, over and over, continue making games that create in people the kind of response that this one did. I’m almost 34 years old and this is the first time in my professional career when I can safely say I just want to keep doing what I’m doing right now for as long as I can.

Bastion Begins

Before playing I was suspicious of the ‘Live Narration’ but it feels extremely natural in practice. How does the final implementation of the narration differ from when the idea was conceived?

I think the way in which we executed on the narration is very close to the original vision for it, once we understood the potential of the technique soon after it was first prototyped. The original prototype contained just a few lines of narration but already expressed the potential of it, we felt. It did start very small, and the technique was only made possible because of the long-standing relationship between Amir, Darren, and Logan our voice actor. These guys have known each other for years, and Darren and Logan were roommates for much of the project for good measure. Having that kind of access to voice talent meant we could do something relatively ambitious with voiceover in spite of our small team size. The use of narration aligned well with the kind of story we wanted to tell, so it all worked out cleanly overall.

The writing was challenging all through the project, and we put a lot into getting it to sound just right. But I think we achieved what we set out to do with it — to deliver an intriguing and atmospheric story at the player’s own pace, without interrupting the play experience for the sake of the story.

I got a real ‘Firefly’ vibe from the game? Was that a choice, a background influence or just a coincidence?

‘Firefly’ combines aspects of the Western genre with science fiction, while we combine aspects of the Western genre with fantasy, so to that extent I do think we have some similarities — I’ll take that reference as a compliment! For what it’s worth, though, ‘Firefly’ was not a major influence on the tone or feel of the game, though it’s possible we have some shared ancestry. One of the original ideas for the tone of Bastion was inspired by the works of the American novelist Cormac McCarthy, who’s written ‘No Country for Old Men’, ‘The Road’, ‘Blood Meridian’, and others. He’s got this incredibly efficient, lyrical style. We thought to ourselves what if he wrote video games instead of these great novels, what would they sound like? Our fantasy-frontier style was born partly from that idea.

The music of Bastion has gathered a real following in the short time since launch, while I’m sure you’ve been asked this a million times, where can I get the soundtrack?

We’re looking into a proper soundtrack release that will live up to the standards you’d expect if you like the game’s music. Darren’s music was important to us all through development, from the earliest stages. Back when we only had these loose ideas about the tone and feel of the game, it was Darren who started executing on it in a specific way — he started belting out these melodies that fully delivered on the tonal ideas. We’re very happy at how the soundtrack has been received and definitely want to find the right way to get it out there for people, so we appreciate everyone’s patience in the mean time!
UPDATE: Soundtrack can now be purchased here!

The Kid checks out the view, not bad.

Without wanting to spoil the fantastic ending, the choice you are given in the final moments was the hardest I’ve ever had to make in a game. Was this choice always part of the story? (I took the option on the right)

The ending was always central to the story I wanted to create for this game, so I’m happy to hear you enjoyed it. It’s very true to the original intention. The way we wrote the game was that we operated off of a high-level outline spelling out all the essential points in the story, but then the narration writing was done based on the exact composition of each level or area in the game. All of it is meant to be building toward that conclusion. It was very important to me and all of us that the ending of the game feel complete and leave players feeling satisfied, so we knew from the start that we were going to invest in trying to make that final sequence something worthwhile. There’s a lot of cynicism out there about how no one finishes games anymore, but I think that’s partly because players have been trained to expect lousy endings in games — why bother playing all the way through if you can’t expect a decent payoff at the end? In our case we wanted to make sure players willing to invest time in our game felt rewarded at the conclusion, and we also wanted to make the sort of game that could leave a lasting positive impression.

Beyond the New Game+ option are there any plans to give gamers more to do in the world of Bastion? DLC to expand the back story perhaps?

We designed Bastion to feel like a complete experience, so there was never any plan to, like, make it a trilogy or hold back cool ideas for DLC or anything like that. At the same time, we wanted to make the sort of gameworld that felt deep and interesting, and could in theory support a variety of stories. So while we have no announcements about additional Bastion content for now, we love the world of this game a lot and will certainly be interested to hear what players out there would like to see from us in the future.

Was that noncommittal enough for you?!

What’s next for Supergiant Games?

Right now it’s all about supporting the recently launched Xbox 360 version of the game while putting the finishing touches on the PC version. We chose to develop versions of the game one at a time in the interest of hitting the best possible quality in each one. From that point, if enough people like what we’ve done this time around then we should be in good shape to keep on going, making games. We intend to stay nice and lean while continuing to do what we do best, as expressed through this first game of ours. I hope to look back one day to see we kept on making games in this vein — games that have a transportive quality and that engage players both through the physical play experience and also through the richness of the narrative. That’s what games are all about to me.

Bastion is available now on XBLA and you can catch up with Supergiant Games at their website.

Supergiant Games show off their E3 awards

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One response to “Greg Kasavin, Writer and Creative Director of Bastion”

  1. Scott avatar

    Dan, I honestly kind of hate you for being the one to interview Greg Kasavin. He was one of my Gamespotting heroes.

    (Not really. Great interview. <3 )

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