Supergiant Games: interview and thoughts

Supergiant Games have developed three titles since the company's inception: Bastion (2011), Transistor (2014), and Pyre (2017).

All three games stand as a testament to video games as interactive art. Playing one of Supergiant Games' games feels like you are playing with an interactive hand drawn picture. If you were to stop at some random point while playing and take a screenshot, it would look like a piece of art. For example, the picture seen above is a screenshot I took during my playthrough. But it's not just the visuals that make the games unique and beautiful, the various musical scores in the titles are varied, powerful, and pair very well with the environments and/or situations that you find yourself in.

These games also just ooze atmosphere; the worlds feel real and the writing makes the characters come to life. One quick example of a moment I really enjoyed was in Transistor. There are voting booths set up throughout the far future fantasy city where the games takes place. At these booths citizens can vote on what kind of weather they want to have that day, or what monument should spring-up in the main park , among various other possibilities. Early in the game, you vote on the color of the sunset, but there are millions of votes and your vote barely ticks the poll in your preferred direction. Towards the end of the game, you are the only one left to vote and can pick whatever sunset you want. All three games are filled with moments like that, which would make me stop playing for a moment to soak in what was happening.

I reached out to Supergiant Games with some questions, and Greg Kasavin, who does the writing for the games as well as some of the actual games design, responded with some great answers.  But first, here is a brief synopsis of the plot of each of Supergiants Games three titles:

 Bastion follows a young boy who wakes up to find the world has been destroyed. You wander the floating remains of the world and attempt to create a safe haven (bastion) where the survivors of the mysterious catastrophe can cling to a new life and their memories of the world that was.

Transistor starts with the main character, Red, pulling a talking sword out of unknown man. You travel through a highly futuristic city as a robotic plague takes over. Red was an opera singer who lost her voice under mysterious circumstances. The game play happens in real time, but you have the option to pause the game and set up strategic attacks, creating a hybrid real time-turn based combat system.

In Pyre you play an exiled reader, in a land where literacy has been outlawed.   The reader has been banished from the commonwealth to this bleak and dangerous land. You team up with a rag-tag group of other exiles (made up of different species—from talking dogs to demons to a fish wearing a suit of armor) to compete in Rites. Rites play out like fantasy version of NBA Jam. Winning certain Rites allows you to have a single party member absolved of his or her past crimes and sent back to the commonwealth. This creates an interesting dynamic because often the characters you like the most and have the most motivation to free, are also the most useful members of your team.        

-I love the music in your titles and how different characters and areas have unique musical themes. What is the process for making the music for each area and character? Do you ever think of the musical piece before finalizing the character? 

Thank you for the kind words! Music has been vital for the tone-setting, atmosphere, and world building of each of our games. We’re fortunate to have Darren Korb, our composer and audio director, working with us full-time all through development, so that we can deeply integrate music into the experience of our games.

Darren starts composing as soon as we have any sense at all of the type of world and tone we’re aiming for, and his work has often helped us to refine that tone during the early stages of development. When working on specific themes for characters or settings, or for specific moments in our stories, I will collaborate with him, sharing ideas about what we’re aiming to achieve and making sure that resonates with Darren from a creative standpoint. He’ll then produce the music and we’ll work together to get it into the game and feeling right in context.

Sometimes Darren makes pieces of music that don’t immediately fit a specific moment we have working in the game, though in time, we’ve always found a place to use his work. For instance, on Pyre, one of the earliest pieces Darren created much later turned into the theme for the Chastity, and fit their pompous demeanor perfectly.

-Supergiant Games all featuring dying or desolate worlds that contain a lot of beauty. Do you draw any inspiration from the real world when crafting the game worlds?

The real world certainly is one of the biggest influences on the make-believe worlds we’ve created in our games. They’re worlds built to reflect certain themes, ideals, and emotions. There being a sense of beauty to these worlds in spite of whatever grim set of circumstances are at stake speaks to aspects that I think connect each of our games and the types of stories they provide.

-Are there any works of fiction or art that have been a particular inspiration for your three titles?

The question of what inspires our games is always difficult to answer in concise way since it’s so many things, though I think it’s astute of you to observe that the real world might have had something to do with it. It would take a very long time I think for me to list all the different works of fiction and art that have influenced our games. It’s never just one or two things, and it’s usually a lot of things for each individual working on our games. We don’t start with a specific or small set of influences we expect everyone on our team to treat the same way.

- Are the worlds of Bastion, Transistor, or Pyre connected in anyway?

They’re certainly connected in that we created each of them. If you’re asking whether they’re explicitly connected in the fiction, the presence or depth of that connection is yours to decide. I think it's great that our games have caused some folks out there to wonder about this. I would say, though, that the foremost goal of each of our games is to assert its own world and identity as strongly as possible. For that reason you haven't seen us making lots of references in our games to our previous games.

-Any big lessons from your older titles that have helped moving forward?

We’ve learned a lot about game making and about working as a team with each game we’ve made. At the same time, we’ve made three rather different games, and the industry itself continues evolving at a rapid pace, so we’re constantly in a learning mode. I’m not sure that any worthwhile learnings here can be reduced to an easily-shared nugget of wisdom. I’ve been working on games professionally for more than 10 years now and it feels every bit as challenging now, and more, than when I started.

 If you get the chance I would highly recommend checking out any of these titles, they are fairly priced ranging from $15 to $20 Bastion is available for every system/console including IOS and the Android. Transistor and Pyre are available on PC Mac and PS4.