Recently we took a deep dive into the making of Bastion, a classic story of a dev-team striking gold on their debut. Now we’ll look at the more challenging development process for their follow-up RPG, Transistor.
Anything But ‘Bastion 2’
After the release and surprise success of Bastion in 2011, the team at San Francisco based SuperGiant Games decided to forge a new path to create something fresh — not just a sequel. Wary of being labelled ‘the Bastion studio’, they wanted their new title to have the same foundational principles: a game with its own identity that would leave players with a positive impression, and continue to focus on deep world-building and interesting gameplay mechanics. Thematically they had the initial concept of a ’sci-fi love story’, and gameplay-wise they wanted to add tactical X-Com style turn-based elements. But how these pieces would eventually fall together wasn’t clear.