Hey, here's a rundown of the latest happenings on the good ship H.M.S. Supergiant Games, where the crew's been hard at work building tons of new content for our game Bastion, which we'll be excited to show you very soon.
Bastion Honored as a Top 10 Break Out Indie Game of 2011: We were thrilled to be hand-picked for DIY Gamer's list of the most promising upcoming independent games from among all the inventive and amazing-looking titles now in development. Have a look at the full list, which includes several of our own most anticipated games.
Mark Your Calendars for Building the Bastion Episode 2: On Friday December 3 at 3:30pm Pacific, we'll once again be live on GiantBomb.com showing you the inner workings of an independent game studio and the day-to-day madness that goes into the making of Bastion. This time we're aiming to delve deeper into the narration aspect of the game, plus take you on a tour through our luxurious work environment... yeah. Discuss Bastion on Giant Bomb and let us know what you want to see!
Vote for Bastion as Indie of the Year: If you're not sick of elections yet -- and who isn't?! -- then we surely would appreciate your vote at Indie DB, which is pitting all new and upcoming independent games in a steel cage deathmatch that only popularity can decide.
Bastion Entered into the 2011 Independent Games Festival: About a month ago we submitted an updated version of the game for judging in the IGF, which each year brings us more and more-impressive indie games than ever before. We're excited to be among the hundreds of promising games in the running this year, and whatever happens, we put our best effort into our submission build. Here's our official IGF page. Wish us luck!
Now then, we'd better get back to it. Till next time!
UPDATE: Show's over and we had a great time! If you tuned in, thanks for watching, and if you missed it, then you can watch it on-demand right here.
On behalf of all of us at Supergiant Games, we invite you to join us at Giant Bomb this Friday, October 29 at 3:30pm PST for the premiere episode of Building the Bastion. This live show will take you behind the scenes of our up-and-coming studio while providing an in-depth look at the making of Bastion and insight into life at a small independent game developer. This is a 30-minute live broadcast, available for free to all viewers!
The show will include a first look at never-before-seen new content for Bastion, as well as a first look at never-before-seen old content for Bastion in the form of early gameplay and narrative prototypes. A portion of the show will be dedicated to questions from the audience, which will be taken from Giant Bomb's members-only chat room.
Occasionally we're going to use this space to bring you insight into the thought process and development process behind our first game, Bastion. To kick things off, here's a detailed look at how we're using our reactive narration technique to give the game its specific tone. This article was first posted on Greg Kasavin's personal blog and we're reprinting it here.
On September 2, I officially joined the small team at Supergiant Games as their creative director, and together we showed our game Bastion for the first time at PAX in Seattle. The response was almost overwhelming, and on a personal level it was one of the most rewarding moments of my professional career. Part of the reason for this is that Bastion is a pure expression of many ideas that are close to my heart – ideas about games, stories, and other things that matter to me – so the enthusiastic response really meant a lot. Granted, my contributions to the project are only just beginning in earnest, but because I was involved in developing the original concept back when my colleagues and I parted ways with Electronic Arts in August of last year, I feel much closer to this game than any other thing I've worked on. For now, I wanted to explain how we're approaching the game's use of storytelling through narration.
Narration in Bastion
In film, narration is one of the most misused and mood-killing techniques out there, for its unique ability to eliminate the type of ambiguity that adds richness to scenes and characters. While I've often fantasized about being able to read people's minds as a superpower, if movies have taught me anything it's that knowing people's inner monologue would make life far less interesting for someone as neurotic as me.
Nevertheless, Bastion uses real-time narration extensively. Its purpose is to deliver story and exposition, and to build atmosphere, investment, and immersion in close partnership with the gameplay. The narration wasn't part of the original game concept. It was born in a flash of inspiration (through a development process that enables such happy accidents to occur), stemming from a couple of self-imposed constraints. The first constraint was to never interrupt the play experience for the sake of story or for any reason, which meant no cutscenes, no dialogue trees, no pressing the A button to advance through dialogue, and none of the other such trappings that tended to slow the pace of other RPGs. I love many games that do these things, but Bastion just isn't this kind of game. One of the things I miss about games in general is that sense of immediacy that console games used to have (before disc-based media ushered in a new era of loading times and cutscenes), where you'd hit Start and, indeed, start the game. Bastion is meant to be that kind of game. Text-based dialogue wasn't going to work. The team's suspicions about how it would negatively affect the pace of the game turned out to be accurate.
From the outset, before the company was even formed, I wanted to work on a game with some narrative substance and emotional depth, to create an original world with its own characters. We would have these long late-night conversations about how to deliver story in ways only possible through the medium of gaming, because why not? Games should aspire to be games. Cinematics interrupt the play experience no matter how well crafted they are. And as much as I love stepping through dialogue in games like Fire Emblem or Torment, I had to agree that reading lots of text in a game usually isn't a good feeling. All the theorizing needed to be grounded in reality due to the would-be team's small size and limited bandwidth in art and animation. This other constraint meant no elaborate scripted scenes or silent emotive storytelling as in games like Ico or Limbo, where nuanced animation is essential to mood-setting and atmosphere.
Eventually through prototyping and experimentation all this led to the idea of real-time narration, having a narrator who responds to the player's input. From the outset I was interested in having the story begin with a young man rising as if from sleep or from death, to discover a world changed around him in some profound way. The story would start on a mysterious but emotionally low point and expand from there. The intent was to provoke questions for the player immediately, and allow the game to reveal two worlds in parallel: the way things are, and the way things used to be. At any rate, in that waking-up moment, it turns out that just by adding the spoken line "He rose" to coincide with the player's input, it got a lot stronger. (This later changed to the current "He gets up" after further exploration of the narrative style.) This was one of an initial set of lines that our studio co-founder Amir recorded with our audio director Darren and their childhood friend Logan, a theatrical actor who provides the narrator's voice, after Amir suspected that adding narration may bring something positive to the experience. I remember when I first heard it, not knowing what quality it would have, never even having heard Logan's voice before. It felt powerful even inside a low-fidelity prototype. Players don't normally expect this type of output from a game, so it immediately speaks to some of the qualities that are specific to Bastion. The narrator's voice alone says a lot about the game.
The other reason, probably the main reason, Bastion is using narration is because of Logan. In addition to being perfect for the part, Logan offers us one other great advantage: We have access to him. Some people mistook his voice for Ron Perlman's. Let's say we could afford Ron Perlman, lost our minds, and decided he'd be better than Logan for the part. We'd have maybe two or three recording sessions with him for the lifetime of the game. With Logan we can iterate rapidly, and we need to in order to get the narration in the game to feel as closely connected as possible to the moment-to-moment play.
Logan's natural speaking voice is quite different from that of the narrator, though we were always interested in a fantasy-frontier aesthetic, something with some the beautiful-melancholy tone of some of Cormac McCarthy's novels. I also take inspiration from the late William Gaddis, whose novels have characters with such distinctive voices. And so we developed a character who embodies the tone we were interested in. And Logan nailed it.
Bastion's narrator is designed to support our game on a fundamental level. He's a man of few words not only for fictional reasons but also, conveniently, to support a design constraint that we simply can't have him talking a lot during gameplay. Bastion has a very fast feel to it, closer to an action game than a typical action role-playing game. Our narrator needs to be very concise to keep up with the pace.
Five Rules for Writing Bastion
Logan can probably make the stupidest combination of words sound awesome. Even still I'm attempting to write good material for him, in the spirit of not wasting the player's time with bloated unnecessary prose. By exploring the character and which types of narration work best for the game, we gain a low-level understanding of the narration in addition to our high-level goals for it. As such, here are the factors I bear in mind when writing for the game:
1. Dialogue is for subtext. The player's actions in the game are the "text", the surface-level things that happen. When the player explores, builds things, attacks things, or acquires items, these are all clear and affordant actions. There was initially a temptation and a novelty in having the narrator declare these actions along the way. But this would mean missing the point of why we have the narrator in the game. This would have resulted in that brand of movie-style narration I dislike so much.
Our narrator deepens the player's interactions by saying something about them that the player could not have known. He provides character intent, subplot, and backstory through his comments. The ultimate goal with every line is for it to tell you something about the player character, the narrator, the way the world is, and the way the world used to be. For example, the first item you find in the game is a large sledgehammer, to which the narrator says, "Kid finds his lifelong friend." You can see that it's a hammer so you don't need the narrator to point that out, but through the narration you can deduce that the protagonist has history with this hammer and that the narrator knows it. Further, through the narrator's particular delivery you sense that this history has had its ups and downs. Using this type of narration, we gradually build the backstory in the context of the player's immediate actions and surroundings – I would never expect you to care about something that wasn't onscreen. Following the points in my GDC presentation, I mean to deliver on the major questions raised in the game, but moment-to-moment this type of narration should give a sense of a detailed world that existed before you started playing the game.
2. Keep it short. Our narrator is a storyteller but a terse man. Unlike me he doesn't waste his breath, and that's fortunate because our environments are packed with detail and leave no room for long speeches. In order to achieve the moment-to-moment reactive feel we want from the narration, the lines have to be short. Our narrator has a flair for the dramatic and speaks in a low flat voice, so tonally the lines tend to fit well together even if there's a lot of silence in between statements. These were factors in the character design.
3. No breaking the fourth wall. One of the most exciting aspects of having a narrator in our game are all the opportunities to break from player expectations, and raise a lot of interesting questions over time. A temptation in all this is to have the narrator address the player directly or step out of the story and break into metafiction, maybe tutorialize the game by telling you when to press and hold the X button and so forth. But it didn't take long to realize this wasn't going to work. As mentioned earlier on, our high-level goals include building immersion and investment. If the narrator were to break the fourth wall, we might get a momentary gag out of it but we'd be undermining the experience we want to achieve by violating the player's expectations around the game's own logic. We have a cleaner way of training players, and as with everything else, the narrator is there to reinforce those moments without stepping on them.
4. Reward experimentation and playing with finesse. Our narrator provides a great reward system, provided players like what he does for the game. I want players to develop a relationship with him as a character and to feel like they can provoke certain types of comments out of him. This happens to be well in line with the type of play experience we want to deliver, one where players feel like they can do whatever they want in the world, experiment with all the different systems and weapons, explore a bit off the beaten path, and so on. Having the narrator specifically acknowledge these moments tends to provide positive reinforcement in a natural way. We realized the closest thing to what we were going for were some of our favorite announcers in games from completely different genres, from the announcer screaming "BOOM-SHAKALAKA" after an awesome dunk in NBA JAM to Shao Khan saying "Excellent" after a ferocious uppercut in Mortal Kombat (both games were done by Midway in their glory days). The key difference is our narrator isn't quipping, he's telling a contiguous story for the most part. Having him sneak in a few incidental remarks based on the player's choices or performance helps make the whole thing feel personal and specific.
5. No repeats. When done properly, our real-time narration starts to take on the quality of a story unfolding, and starts to get at those high-level goals we want to achieve. But nothing sucks the momentum out of the game's narrative like a repeated line. Almost every game uses repetitious dialogue even if it's got tens of thousands of lines of dialogue in it; combat encounters will repurpose enemy battle chatter and so on. With Bastion we realized that the moment any line repeated itself – for example, our narrator has different things to say if the player falls off a ledge – immersion is broken. You realize in that moment that you're playing a game where the narrator might loop through a host of different lines after a specific event, as in a real-time strategy game where your units will cycle through several responses whenever you issue an order. So we drew a line in the sand: No repeats in the game, not unless you replay the game from the start or restart a scenario from scratch (and even then we mix up the narration). This posed certain design challenges, such as what happens if a player revisits certain areas, but we're happily taking those on in the spirit of maintaining the feel we're going for.
Conclusion
If there's one main underlying point in all this, it's that everything we're doing with the narration in Bastion is there only to support the specific type of play experience we're making. Everything from how the narrator character sounds and how he talks came about purposefully as part of the exploration around gameplay concepts and game themes. Bastion is hardly the first game to use narration to deliver story, so we never set out to pursue the idea of having a narrator purely for the sake of being different. Instead, we're pursuing it because we realized it worked well for the game we wanted to make and for the process we're using to make it.
We have returned safely from PAX in Seattle, which was an absolutely awesome event for us. In revealing Bastion in playable form at this show, we wanted to get the game into as many players' hands as possible so that they could experience it for themselves. The response was everything we could have hoped for. We were already fired up to keep pushing forward in the particular direction of our game, and now we're even more excited to build out the rest of it to the level that will live up to players' highest expectations as well as our own. To those of you who played the game at PAX, thank you so much for your vote of confidence. The looks on many of your faces as you played has validated all the work leading up to this point.
The hand-painted artwork, the real-time narration, and the tight responsive feel of the combat stood out to many of you. To get an impression of what the show was like for us, visit our Facebook page and view our PAX 2010 photo gallery. There we have images of players flocking to our booth area as well as some of the special guests who showed up looking to play what we've been working on. We demoed the game for three days straight, and both of our demo stations were full pretty much at all times. For those of you who waited patiently for a chance to play, we hope you enjoyed our delicious home-made Scumbag Cookies (which taste better than they sound).
So thanks again to everyone who made PAX such an outstanding show for us. All of us on team agreed that the show was among the greatest experiences in our professional careers. We're doing more than just hoping that this was a a sign of things to come: We will continue to do our absolute best to make Bastion live up to the potential that so many of you now have seen in it.
In addition to the incredible response we got from players, we were fortunate to receive a good amount of media coverage during the show. What follows is a list of all the coverage we've read – if we missed anybody, please let us know!
We know PAX was a busy time for the gaming press, so we really appreciate that dozens of outlets took time out to cover the game. To all of you who gave us your time and attention at the show, we hope it was well worth your while.
You've seen the game. Now... experience the press release. But seriously, here's the official word on our first game. We're so excited to finally raise the curtain on what we've been working on! Even if you've been following us closely thus far, you'll want to read this for some exciting new details. Note: If you'd like a PDF copy of this announcement, you can download it here.For screenshots and our official trailer, check our media page.
. . . .
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Supergiant Games Unveils "Bastion", an Original Action Role-Playing Game
Set in a lush imaginative world, the digitally-distributed title invites players to create and fight for civilization's last refuge as a mysterious narrator marks their every move.
SAN JOSE, CA – September 2, 2010 – Supergiant Games, an independent start-up studio founded by ex-designers of the hit Command & Conquer franchise, announced today that it is developing Bastion for digital platforms. Featuring a unique interactive narrative style and hand-painted environments in dazzling full-HD, Bastion challenges players to build a new world from the broken remnants of the past.
The goal of the game is to construct a safe haven in the wake of the Calamity, a cataclysmic event that shattered the world into a series of floating islands. As players journey into the wild unknown in search of survivors and supplies, they will confront strange beasts, forge an array of customizable weapons, and gain new powers from specially-brewed spirits. The entire play experience of Bastion is dynamically narrated, gradually revealing a rich backstory as the narrator reacts to the player's actions in real time.
"Our goal with Bastion is to hit players' emotional chords in unexpected ways, in addition to delivering highly responsive gameplay that rewards finesse and experimentation," said game industry veteran Greg Kasavin, Supergiant Games' Creative Director. "We're pushing to make it so that players become absorbed in the game'sdistinctive setting and narrative tone from the first moments."
Bastion will be shown in playable form at the PAX Prime event on September 3-5 in Seattle, where it is being featured among the PAX 10, an exclusive selection of the most promising upcoming independent games. "It's an honor to be selected for the PAX 10 from among all of the inspired and great-looking indie games currently in development," said Amir Rao, Co-founder of Supergiant Games. "We're very excited to show Bastion for the first time at PAX, where thousands of people will be able to get their hands on the game and see what makes it special."
Bastion will also be featured in a new video series chronicling the making of the game, exclusively at GiantBomb.com, the world's largest editable video game database. In the ongoing series titled "Building the Bastion", viewers will receive unprecedented insight into the trials and tribulations of independent game development through the story of Supergiant Games. "People all over the world invest countless hours into playing video games, but so few of us ever get to truly find out how they're made," said Giant Bomb Editor-in-Chief Jeff Gerstmann. "With Building the Bastion, we're going let our community ride shotgun with a mix of behind-the-scenes footage and regular live broadcasts that let you interact directly with the developers as they take Bastion from early prototypes to a full and final product."
Bastion is scheduled to be completed in the summer of 2011. The game is not yet rated by the ESRB. For the latest information on the game, visit www.buildthebastion.com.
. . .
About Supergiant Games
Founded in 2009, Supergiant Games is a small independent developer with big ambitions: to make games that spark players' imaginations like the games they played as kids, while enabling them to share the experience with those they love. Prior to forming the company, the founders spent years working together in key design roles on successful, big-budget productions for major publishers, but walked away in order to take bolder creative risks crafting games for people who love gaming. Supergiant Games is headquartered in San Jose, CA. To learn more, visit www.supergiantgames.com.
About Giant Bomb
GiantBomb.com is a website about video games for people who love gaming. The site features the world's largest editable video games database, and is also the definitive source for gaming information, news, and reviews. Led by veteran games journalist Jeff Gerstmann, Giant Bomb's editorial team produces hours of original video each week and a regular podcast that reaches over 100,000 listeners each week. At the heart of Giant Bomb is its passionate community that contributes massive amounts of user-generated content and actively participates in site quests and forum discussions. Giant Bomb is a Whiskey Media property located in San Francisco, CA.
We're very pleased to announce that Mr. Greg Kasavin joins us today as Creative Director. He'll be writing all the words you read and hear in our games, in addition to conjuring up our gameworlds, characters, and stories, among many other things. Greg is best known for his years working as Editor-in-Chief of GameSpot, though he's been quietly making a difference in game development since 2007.
Greg met Supergiant Games cofounders Amir and Gavin at EA LA, where they worked together on Command & Conquer 3 and Red Alert 3 and became fast friends. Now that they've reunited, their first act together again will be to drive for 14 hours to Seattle. PAX awaits!
Giant Bomb continues its pre-PAX coverage of Bastion with an exclusive reveal of our official trailer for the game, plus a brand-new slew of screenshots from the build we'll be showing later this week!
To coincide with this, we've just launched our Bastion Media Page, featuring our official trailer plus eight screenshots in full-HD glory. These screens are the real deal, taken straight out of the silky-smooth playable sequence we'll be letting people get their hands on at PAX.
So have a look at all this Bastion madness and if you're planning to go to PAX this week, be sure to come visit us to experience the game for yourself! There's still more news in store this week leading up to the big show, so keep your eyes peeled. And let us know what you think!
The good men at Giant Bomb ran a story on Bastion's forthcoming debut at PAX Prime this week: Exclusive Glimpse at a PAX 10 Selection. As you'll glean from the story, there's going to be lots more to come...! The article features a never-before-seen screenshot of the game. To the dude who posted the comment, "Wow, if that's a screenshot and not a mock-up, then I really want to see it in action!" -- we can confirm that's a 100% pure screenshot taken straight out of the game at its native full HD resolution, from the sequence we'll be showing at PAX. The game looks at least as good in action since it runs silky smooth! But now we're getting ahead of ourselves. Stay tuned!
We've been radio-silent in recent weeks but behind the scenes it's been a wild and exciting lead-up to the upcoming debut of our first game, Bastion. Our whole team's been heads-down putting the finishing touches on our first production level, which will be playable at PAX Prime starting Friday, September 3. So get ready for a slew of info about what we've been working on for the past year. We're so happy to get to unveil what we've been working on at a place like PAX, where people will get to experience it firsthand and tell us what they think. Expect lots more news from us this week, and if you're going to the show, be sure to drop by and visit us at the PAX 10 floorspace. Until then, we leave you with a small sample of one of the many scenes we've created for this game.
We're excited to announce that we got into the PAX10 and that we'll be at PAX Prime 2010 in September! We'll join nine other independent games that were hand-picked by a panel of judges to be showcased at the event. We'll be revealing more information about our game leading up to PAX. We hope to see you guys there, so you can get hands-on with the game.
Thank you to the judges and Penny Arcade for selecting us!
