Supergiant Games is a small studio that have created some
fantastic pieces of media, today I will do a short biography of their
contribution to games since their inception in 2009. They are a San Francisco
based company with a meagre seven to twelve members, however have successfully
produced some of the most interesting and diverse games to date. Over their
career at the time of writing this they have produced two games and one more in
the works.
I’ll break down each game and cover particularly why they
were so successful and interesting mechanics and things of note of each game. One
quite interesting fact is that they are all created with C# MonoGame/XNA, while
a very useful tool for a starting game developer it is not often used at a professional
level and to such high graphical fidelity and standard.
Bastion (2011)
Bastion was Supergiant’s first game, originally launched on
Xbox LIVE Arcade and due to its success had following versions on PC, Chrome
Web Store, Mac App Store, Linux, iPad and finally PS4, winning over a hundred
awards and selling over 2.32m units on PC alone.
It is an ARPG (action role-playing game) in a hand-painted
isometric based world, set after an apocalypse called ‘the calamity’. The game
includes a dynamic narrator (Logan Cunningham) which provides validation on
your actions and provides a very interesting way of storytelling, while
allowing the user to feel they are telling their own story.
The soundtrack is composed by Darren Korb, who creates music
for all three games; this won many awards itself to the self-styled genre ‘acoustic
frontier trip-hop’. This is one of Bastion’s key to success as it beautifully compliments
the art styling and theme of the game.
The stand out feature that sets Bastion a foot above the
rest is its fantastic writing and storytelling, the immersive nature of the narrator,
the complimenting music and fantastic ending provide a solid experience. Small
hints of lore are slowly revealed as the player encounters or interacts with
certain things throughout the story. This allows the user to slowly understand
the situation they’re in without facts being crammed down their throats, with a
final ending better than most leaves a very satisfied taste.
Transistor (2014)
Transistor was Supergiant’s next title, by using the
proceeds of Bastion allowed the team to self-publish compared to Bastion which
used Warner-Bros as a publisher for the title. It was originally released for
the PC and PS4 selling just over 1m units on PC, this was then expanded to
cover Mac, Linux, iPhone and iPad versions.
It continues using the set recipe of isometric ARPG although
set in a futuristic setting, it provides a shorter but better polished game and
arguably one of the best looking games to date, especially for an indie
development game. Using a similar
storytelling methodology but with the absence of the narrator. The game built
on Bastions battle action system which while good and responsive were
relatively limited and non-engaging, Transistor attempts to remedy this by
including a quasi-turn-based action system that can be used in instanced fights
to queue up abilities and movement, rather than Bastion’s one continuous world
with battles happening sporadically.
The soundtracks were again composed by Darren Korb but with
the voice of Ashley Barrett to create some stunning immersive music that is
heavily integrated in the story.
Functionally and visually Transistor is superior to Bastion
but subjectively doesn’t do quite as good of a job as Bastion did at immersing
the player in the world.
Pyre (2017)
At current not a huge amount of information has been release
of their current work, however gameplay snippets and some extrapolated lore can
be found from the short snippets available.
In terms of gameplay it provides a very strange mix of rugby,
basketball and rocket league from an isometric perspective, using the
characters you accumulate in the story in a rich fantasy world.
Characters have
varying abilities akin to MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) style games that
can attack, evade or inhibit the opposition who will attempt to do the same
thing. This strange mismatch of genres and games will be interesting to see if
it has a rich amount of depth and complexity.
Story telling has already been shown to be a main focus of
the game, which is good as it’s where Supergiant Games are in their element.
Overall we’ll have to see how it actually performs, but Supergiant’s track
record seems pretty good so far, a company well worth your attention and has
really set a standard for storytelling and graphical fidelity for indie games.
No comments:
Post a Comment