He worked on Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars and Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3. After leaving the published he and a couple of his friends established their own company, Supergiant Games. Bastion is their first game.
It was very nice of Greg to answer a couple of our questions regarding the development of Bastion, game production in general and his views on game journalism.
Dominik Gąska: What makes Bastion unforgettable is the way the game's elements – the world, the graphics, the music and the narrator - all take part in telling the story. Do you believe that how you tell a story is just as important as what the story is about?
Greg Kasavin: I believe in the idea of a good story, well-told. The two components are inseparable –the way in which a story is told is no less important than the content of the story. With Bastion, we recognized that story could potentially elevate the experience of the game past the moment-to-moment fun of the core gameplay. But it was very important to us to deliver the story in a way uniquely possible through the medium of games, which by their nature are an interactive medium. We did not want the storytelling to interrupt the play experience in any way, by feeling like a movie or a book. Eventually through the course of prototyping, our narration technique emerged as a solution to this.
Another of my priorities from a story perspective was to make sure that players always had a clear goal. I wanted the basic structure of the story to be very easy to follow – your objectives in the game always relate to trying to restore this Bastion location. But that's just the framework for richer and more substantive story, for those players paying closer attention or for whom a deeper story is more important. While there's no formula, I often find that these types of stories work well for games, where there's a clear overarching objective but a lot of interesting and unexpected things happening along the way. The original Metal Gear Solid is one of my favorite examples of this – the basic goal of the game seemed very straightforward from the outset, but the story itself was very complex and memorable.
***D.G.: Coming back to the way all of the game’s elements intertwine. Was achieving this kind of coherence challenging in any way? In case of big games teams sometimes have problems with close cooperation. ***
G.K.: Making Bastion of course was challenging for our team, and if it was easy we wouldn't have done it. That said, the opportunity for close collaboration was one of the most exciting and rewarding aspects of the whole process, and one of the core reasons why we wanted to create a new studio. Since our seven-person team is relatively small, the process of connecting the discrete elements of the game is faster and more achievable than in a typical large studio environment where there are many more stakeholders. We recognized this as an advantage, especially having worked at large studios in the past, and made the cohesion of our gameworld a priority during development. We wanted the game to feel complete and fully realized.
I think part of the reason it was possible for us to make this game is because most members of the team have a good amount of history with each other, which led to strong team chemistry. As well, everyone on team was responsible for major portions of the game. For example, Darren alone did all the audio, and Jen was our only artist on the team. I did the story and writing with Amir acting as my editor. We all collaborated and gave feedback on everything, but we were able to iterate quickly and get to results we were satisfied.
Greg Kasavin during a conference meeting on game narration, Game Developers Conference 2010source: Official GDC (CC BY 2.0)
D.G.: What can you tell us about the music score of Bastion? How much did the author know about the world and the story? At which part of the game development process was it made?
G.K.: The music in Bastion all was written for this game by our audio director, Darren Korb. We knew from the early on in the project that we wanted to make an atmospheric game that could provoke an emotional response from players, so naturally the audio would have to play a significant role in that. As well, even from the first days of the project, we were talking about the kind of tone we wanted to create. Darren started writing music for the game relatively early on, before we had any real artwork or anything, but his music captured the tone we were going for rather precisely. In general, Darren had complete access to the world of the game since he was a key member of the team, same as all of us. He would reference the backstory material I was writing and would often communicate with Amir and me with regards to how the music would be integrated into the level design. As far as the use of songs goes, Darren and I would speak at length about the backstory and thematic core of them so that they closely connected to the world and story.
