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Hit List Q&A: Supergiant Games studio director Amir Rao
In the "Hit List" from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, the video game industry's top talents describe their current gaming addictions, their most anticipated releases and more. This week: Supergiant's Amir Rao. Amir Rao is the Studio Director for Supergiant Games, the team behind the AIAS award-winning downloadable game Bastion, which was released on Xbox Live Arcade, Steam, Mac, Linux, Chrome and iOS. Prior to Supergiant Games, Amir worked at Electronic Arts Los Angeles as a designer on Command & Conquer 3 and Red Alert 3.At the upcoming 2013 D.I.C.E. Summit Amir will be speaking on the topic, "Multiplatformism." Over the course of a year, Supergiant Games shipped its award-winning game Bastion on six different platforms with three fundamentally different user interface paradigms. This session covers the design tenets that emerged in translating Bastion from controller to keyboard to touch. The talk will explore Superigant Games' ethos behind picking platforms, while considering if the future of elegant design is truly interface agnostic.
Bastion's canceled feature: 'Find a shoe? Plant it.'
Supergiant Games spent one year working on a "rich gardening feature" for Bastion that the entire team was "really excited about," but was eventually cut from the game, designer Amir Rao said at GDC. The final version of Bastion demonstrates the team's obsession with plants, but gardening itself was set to play a pivotal role in exploration and players' overall sense of accomplishment, Rao said, breaking it down into four functions: Players would find seeds for story items and worlds Planters on the Bastion would open up gradually, limiting how many seeds could be planted Plants would be watered with blue "cores" They would sprout and the fruit would offer its item, world, etc.Gardening in Bastion faced a slew of problems, but mostly the seeds had no aesthetic connection to the final plant -- "What does a 'hammer plant' look like?" Rao asked -- and Supergiant eventually realized that they were solving the wrong problem. What Bastion really needed was a menu.
