TH E MAK ING O F. . . PYRE
How Supergiant’s third game found plenty of benefits to life on the Downside
“PART OF MY RESPONSIBILITY IS TO LOOK FOR COMMON THEMES THAT CAN PULL IDEAS TOGETHER”
Your journey through the Downside,
Pyre’s colourful purgatory, is conducted at a trundling pace: you ride within a rattling, rickety caravan alongside a growing cast of fellow exiles, all cast out from the world above. By contrast, its own development began in something of a hurry. This wasn’t so much down to pragmatic concerns as a keen desire to make a fresh start, Supergiant Games’ writer-designer Greg Kasavin tells us. Shortly after its 2014 release, it was clear that the studio’s second game, Transistor, was a hit; a team anxious to discover whether it could repeat the unprecedented success of its debut, 2011’s isometric action-RPG Bastion, realised with delight that it was no one-hit wonder. But
Transistor had taken longer than anticipated to make: three years in all, where Bastion was finished in less than two. “It was with a mix of relief and... ‘urgency’ isn’t quite the word,” Kasavin tells us. “But we were very eager to start on a new game once Transistor was done.
“As we self-fund our projects, our foremost goal is to make something worthwhile that does well enough for us to be able to go and make something new after that,” he continues. Early indications were that Transistor had sold well enough for the 12-strong team to stick together, and so just two months after its launch, the first ideas for Pyre were already brewing within the studio. Which isn’t to say that Supergiant had been planning ahead, however. “Many studios try to do that, and in a lot of ways, it’s a responsible thing to do,” Kasavin laughs. “For us it’s a mix of pragmatism and a little bit of superstition that prevents us from doing that. Since we’re a single-project studio, nothing matters more than the thing we’re working on at any given moment. And as I’m sure you’ve heard other developers corroborate, the final weeks of development are some of the most vital. It’s a time to not lose focus, and not get distracted by the grass being greener on the other side of the tough situation you’re currently in.”
Kasavin talks of each of Supergiant’s games being a response of sorts to the previous one; as such, it was a conscious choice to paint on a grander canvas than before. “Transistor is an even more focused story than Bastion’s,” he says. “It’s this very specific little story about an episode in these characters’ lives. So we were very drawn to making a game with a much larger cast of characters, because we so enjoy character creation and world building. We said, ‘Let’s make a bigger game and see what that’s like, even if it’s just a matter of getting it out of our system’.”
As with its games, the studio’s process to starting a new project has been different every time. Yet despite having the same team in place, by Kasavin’s own admission Supergiant hasn’t yet perfected its approach. “We don’t know where the most important idea is going to come from, necessarily,” he says. “Our experience is that those ideas just tend to flourish over time, and they’re not immediately identifiable in all cases.” So how does it all start? Does everyone gather in a room and spitball ideas? “It’s close to that,” he says. “At least that’s how Pyre started. Our team doesn’t have ‘departments’ – I’m the sole writer, Darren [Korb] is our sole composer, and we have one art director in Jen Zee, so people can speak directly to their own craft and just talk about the kind of thing they want to build, what sort of tone they’re interested in. Part of my responsibility on the writing side, and to some extent the design side, is to look for common themes that can pull a lot of those ideas together.”
The results so far seem to bear out the value of that approach, though Kasavin says with no little modesty that he doesn’t consider the studio’s games as experimental “by any stretch of the imagination”. But they’re not exactly straightforward genre pieces either. “They’re somewhere in between,” he suggests. “We don’t start from an existing template with our games, for better or worse. We take time to explore in different gameplay directions to see if there’s anything there in terms of what we want to make.” So in Pyre’s case, which came first, story or gameplay? “Actually, that question has a fairly straightforward answer for us, which is: gameplay does come first, end of story,” he says. “However, the narrative theming is developed very closely in partnership with the gameplay prototyping, and that prototyping is done with at least a certain theme in mind – it may not be a specific story, but at least a general sense of direction as to how it may contribute to a meaningful experience.”
This holistic approach
finds its perfect expression in Pyre’s Rites: a kind of celestial competitive sport that plays out like a slow-paced twist on three-on-three basketball. These went through “an enormous amount” of iteration, Kasavin tells us, though on a fundamental level the finished version is remarkably similar to its initial concepts. “It was always a three-versus-three, semi-symmetrical framing, where there was always this object, the celestial orb, that one character at a time could possess,” he says. “And there was always this concept of the auras that the characters can use both for offence and defence.”
While these core elements remained from the very earliest stages, the Rites evolved in other ways – though the notion that these face-offs were part of an ancient ritual was established relatively early. “But there were very early prototype versions that were not about trying to extinguish an opponent’s flame,” he says. “It took us a while to get to the specific idea of the pyres themselves having to be extinguished as the victory condition, as opposed to maybe trying to fill a pot with some sort of substance on the opposite side.” He laughs at the thought: “Certainly the end result is somewhat unusual in its own right, but we tried much stranger stuff before we finally got to where we did with it.”
Since scoring players are temporarily banished, leaving the numbers uneven, the mechanics of the Rites reinforce the central theme of characters being highly dependent on one