
Being independent is an important part of our identity. We value our independence and the ability to make our own decisions and figure out our own games and do it in our own way. Rao: For us, we don’t feel any different from when we started Bastion, when we were just two people. GamesBeat: Some people have referred to your class of company now as “super-indies.” I don’t know how you feel about that term or what it might mean. We still have some audio guys in New York, but we’re no longer living in my dad’s house, thanks to Bastion. We have an office in San Francisco now, in SoMa. Rao: Yeah, we’re out of my dad’s house in San Jose. GamesBeat: Are you still working out of the house in – So far, we just want to deliver on the expectations of these people who are so excited. We didn’t know what to expect after Bastion, doing a new game in a new world. The response we’ve gotten has been tremendous. Rao: We’ve shown the game at PAX three times and E3 once. GamesBeat: Have the fans reacted in any particular way? Rao: Transistor will be coming out very soon, on May 20. We haven’t ruled anything out, but right now we have no plans. Rao: Right now, we’re totally focused on our initial commercial release. GamesBeat: Is Microsoft potentially an opportunity for you? We have an enormous audience of Bastion players on Steam, and we can self-publish there as well. PlayStation gave us a path to self-publishing there.

#Bastion supergiant Pc#
We’re all long-time console game players, in addition to PC game players, and we were really excited to do that. With PlayStation, we were able to be part of a console launch, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. At the time we made the decision, the two that would allow that were Steam and PlayStation. Rao: We were interested in platforms where we could self-publish. GamesBeat: How did you choose some of the platforms you’ve turned toward? Here we’re interested in taking what we learned and using it in a different way.Ībove: Transistor, Supergiant’s follow-up to Bastion.

It’s a big part - we learned a lot about storytelling from our use of voice-over in Bastion. GamesBeat: Is that how you convey the story? Rao: It’s not narrated like Bastion, but there is a voice that comes from the Transistor that you hear from the start of the game. GamesBeat: Did you decide not to do the same kind of narration? We’re using voice-over in the game in a different way, too. It’s still made by the same team as Bastion, and I think it bears our signature. All of that is fueling some of the strategic stuff, but put into a more immediate, reactive context. They love Final Fantasy Tactics and a lot of other games. A lot of people on the team have turn-based games that they love. For me personally, at least, on the gameplay side, Fallout and Fallout 2 were a big inspiration. Rao: For every different piece of it, it’s a different influence. GamesBeat: Can you point at any particular games that influenced you? When you’re playing Transistor, you can go in and fight in real time, but you can also pause at any time, try out your actions, dial them in, and see how it all turns out. The place we wanted to take it was to take the real, immediate feel of a real-time game and combine that with some of the strategic and tactical sensibilities that we got from old isometric games. We felt like there was a lot of richness there. We were interested in exploring the action-RPG genre more. Rao: Transistor is a science-fiction action-RPG. There was ongoing work from when Bastion finished, but we weren’t really on it together as a team until sometime in 2012, where everyone was working on it full-time.

Rao: We started a little bit before that. GamesBeat: Did you start Transistor around the end of 2012? We’re nearly done with Transistor for the PlayStation 4 and PC. Rao: At the end of Bastion, we were seven people. Bastion came out in July 2011, and I think we were done with the last version - it shipped in September 2012. It felt right for every single platform it came to.
#Bastion supergiant software#
It was important for us to do it ourselves, because we wanted to do something where it was more than just a port, a shopped-out software port. Rao: We spent a significant amount of time reimagining Bastion for all those platforms.

GamesBeat: Did that take a lot of your time as far as porting it to all of those?
