What were your ideas and influences for creating the world of Transistor, and how did you expect players to feel when they begin to explore it?
Kasavin: It is difficult to pin down a specific set of influences, since there are so many from multiple media, and our influences are specific to each of the disciplines that form the game -- from the art and audio to the gameplay to the writing and so on. When beginning a project we tend to think a lot about the overall tone of the experience, what we want the feel of the game to be. In Transistor, we decided early on to pursue this idea of a vintage-futuristic setting, with what we called an 'operatic' tone for all that implies. I think we wanted players to experience the grandeur of the setting and the intensity of the personal stakes of the characters, while enjoying the mysteries of the gameplay -- having access to this all-powerful weapon with seemingly limitless capability. Broadly speaking, after having made this weird fantasy-frontier world in Bastion, we wanted to see what we could do in the science-fiction genre this time around.
What lessons did you take from Bastion's development and apply to the development of Transistor?
Kasavin: Although I would never downplay the effort that went into making Bastion, we were very fortunate to have a relatively smooth development process on that game, all things considered. Since the game ended up being both critically and commercially successful, it really validated our particular approach to game development, and we wanted to approach our second game from a similar mindset: Make something new that our team was excited about, playing to the strengths of the individuals on the team.
We did not approach Transistor from the perspective of trying to fix anything about Bastion. We were more interested in making a new game with its own distinct identity. As a result, nothing about Transistor was a foregone conclusion, and even when we arrived at similar decisions to ones we made on Bastion (such as the camera angle), it was because we felt it was right for this new game.
