12/19/2023 0 Comments Bastion game location![]() ![]() Darren's music just nailed the tone, and the music ended up being important all through development. It was the first content to really make good on the tonal ideas and bring them to life. He called the style he came up with "acoustic frontier trip-hop", as a short-hand for the fantastic-yet-familiar setting and tone we wanted. With some of these ideas in mind, Darren Korb our audio director started creating music for the game. We wanted the game to be suitable for players of all ages, and I was very interested in writing a story from that perspective – like a modern version of a traditional fairytale. We wanted to have a more positive and hopeful tone, ultimately. One important difference, though, was that we wanted to extract the sense of evil from out of his work. We wondered what that type of style would sound like in a game. ![]() His writing has an Old West flavor even if it's not set in that kind of environment. He's got this amazing lyrical writing style, minimal dialogue rich with subtext crossed with these beautiful natural scenes. One of the influences I brought up early on is the American author Cormac McCarthy, who's written novels like Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and The Road. From the earliest days on the project we were talking about the tone we wanted to strike, and how we would express that through the game. We knew we wanted Bastion to be an atmospheric game because we feel that one of the most important aspects of games is their transportive quality, their ability to make you feel like you're in some completely different place. What sources did you look or listen to for inspiration for the world of Bastion? What feelings or references do you hope the visuals and audio evoke in players? ![]() The music and visuals of Bastion combine to craft a world unlike many others we’ve seen in recent video games. Not only is this because the game itself is pretty big, at around eight or more hours for the first play-through, but because we wanted to account for as many little situational moments as we could think of in order to make players feel like their experience with the game was unique. In the end it turned out to be a large volume of content, somewhere around 3,000 lines of narration. We never considered any other actor and Logan was just perfect for the part we had in mind, which happened to line up just right with the kind of story I had been mulling. So we were able iterate rapidly with the writing and recording, trying lots of different things from a narrative standpoint. And when you're a small team like we are, you need to make the most of every advantage like that. He's a childhood friend of Amir's and was rooming with Darren Korb our audio director at the time, so we had great access to this really talented actor who we were close with. We wouldn't have pursued this narration technique at all were it not for Logan Cunningham our voice actor. It was the perfect solution to what we wanted, plus it gave me some really interesting constraints to work with from a writing perspective: We would have a story filtered entirely through a single voice, who would be there to deepen the player's interactions onscreen by giving context to those actions. At first these goals seemed contradictory, but as it turned out, using narration allowed us to deliver story and context and narrative depth at the player's pace. The narration came up as an idea during the course of the nine months the game spent in a prototyping phase, during which time it was mostly just Amir Rao and Gavin Simon, the studio co-founders, rapidly trying different things.įrom the beginning of the project we felt we wanted to make a game that could have some emotional weight to it, but we also knew we didn't want to interrupt the play experience for any reason. It wasn't something that was contemplated from the beginning of the project, but then, the project didn't start with some grand design document or detailed feature set. Like most of the ideas in Bastion, the idea for the narration was born in the living room of a house in San Jose where the studio is located. Where and when did the idea of Bastion’s narrator emerge? Why was it important to keep the narration a continuous part of the gameplay? Who ended up performing the narration, and how was that decided? ![]() For all of Kasavin’s responses, check out the complete interview below. A portion of the interview appears in Game Informer issue 222. Now that the game has been out for several weeks, we wanted to ask creative director Greg Kasavin about the experience of making the game. Like a lot of the folks who played this summer’s Bastion from Supergiant Games, we came away extremely impressed. ![]()
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