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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |