Last month we figured we'd be in for a busy and exciting 2011, and based on how January's gone down, we ain't disappointed. It's been a whirlwind last few weeks as we drive toward finishing Bastion and doing everything possible to make sure it makes a big splash when the game arrives this summer. Here's the lowdown about what's new with us these days:

Friday the 28th: Watch Us Live on Giant Bomb The next installment of Building the Bastion will be live on GiantBomb.com on Friday, January 28 at 3:30pm PST, so be sure to tune in. (Edit: Show's over! Watch it on demand right here.) This time around you'll see and hear much more about how we create our reactive narration for the game, and we'll be showing some of the very first examples of it implemented almost a year ago. You'll also get to see how the game's art style evolved from the crude prototypes we've shown in the past, into something closer to looking like a normal game – not that that was good enough for us. We'll be taking questions from viewers so be sure to chime in if you want to know about any aspect of how we're making this game.

Have We Mentioned We're IGF Finalists? Very few independent games are chosen as finalists in the annual Independent Games Festival, and fewer still are honored with nominations in more than one category. So you can imagine we were thrilled to learn we got the nod in the categories of Excellence in Visual Arts and Excellence in Audio. In addition to all the things we're doing to make the game a great-feeling, responsive, exciting play experience from moment to moment, we're doing everything we can to make the world of Bastion deep and interesting, filled with rich and meaningful detail – so to be recognized by the IGF judges for the work we've done thus far on the visuals and audio of the game is a real honor. Keep your fingers crossed for us come Wednesday, March 2 when the winners of the IGF will be announced during the live awards ceremony. And by the way, us getting nominated in the IGF means...

We're Going to GDC If you're planning on going to the Game Developers Conference, please come visit us in the IGF pavilion during show hours, where we'll have a playable build of Bastion for you to check out. GDC has long been an exciting and inspiring show for us so it's very exciting to get to go to it in this capacity.

Bastion Development Update The next few months will be critical for us, but so far so good. We're about a month away from our next major internal milestone, at which all our game content will be intact and the entire game will be playable from start to finish. We're very close already, just building out some of the final areas of the game, as we've been building it out sequentially. Gavin is pretty much there from an engineering standpoint and will be polishing the game from here on out (we polish as we go anyway and now it'll happen even faster), while Jen, Amir, and I are pushing forward with the remainder of the content. Meanwhile Darren and Logan are plenty occupied with all the new voiceover, sounds, and music going into the game. We've got a lot of hard work ahead of us still, though day by day, all the pieces are falling into place according to plan, to ensure we can release the game right when we want to. We'll keep you posted on any official announcements.

And That's Not All! We have an exciting bit of news to share about our studio coming this Friday, so check back again in the next day. I keep wanting to make a "care package inbound" joke – you'll know what I mean tomorrow. Still more cool stuff brewing beyond that. Thanks for keeping tabs on us!

-- GregK

What an amazing way to start a new year. This morning we were thrilled to learn that Bastion is a finalist in the 2011 Independent Games Festival in the categories of Excellence in Visual Art and Excellence in Audio. Congratulations to all the other finalists and honorable mentions -- IGF finalists and winners are deterimined by a distinguished panel of judges from the independent game development community, and earning their recognition is a real honor considering all the many outstanding games they evaluate as part of the process.

We're happy to see that the work we've done so far on Bastion's presentation has struck a chord, as the game's audio and visuals are so key to creating the atmosphere and world. All the more reason for us to keep on pushing as hard as we can on these fronts and in all our areas of focus. Now then, it's back to work for us!

Here's to a great 2011. Thanks again to all of you who are already excited about what we're doing. Next year we will do everything we can to make it up to you.

That's us up there, from left to right: Logan Cunningham, Darren Korb, Amir Rao, Jen Zee, Gavin Simon, and Greg Kasavin.

As the year draws to a close, we're steeling ourselves for what promises to be an even more exciting 2011 for all of us at Supergiant Games. For now let me give you a quick update about what we've been up to and how our game's coming along.

Bastion named a Top-5 Best Upcoming Indie of 2010 in Indie DB's Editors' Choice Awards: This was awesome. Out of all the independent games now in development (that have been announced), Indie DB's editors named Bastion one of the five most promising ones. We're humbled to be mentioned in the same breath as games like Fez, Overgrowth, Dustforce, and of course Monaco.

Bastion in the news: Also check out new previews of our latest build on GameSpot, G4TV.com, and even Multiplayer.it for all you Italian speakers out there. They've all had great things to say about how we're doing so far. Plus you can check out new interviews with some of us on Dead Pixel Live and Big Download, with still more coming soon. There's always a lot we want to say and show about our process and about our game, though of course there's much more we intend never to show or talk about when it comes to the game content itself, since we don't want to spoil it.

Bastion development update: Right now we're putting the finishing touches on the last remaining game systems, including some of the later structures you'll gain access to and creatures you'll encounter, and forging ahead on the last third-or-so of the game's content. Darren's recently composed a bunch of great new music and Logan's delivered an awesome performance on hundreds of new lines of narration we've since plugged into the game, so the game content has been growing at a good clip.

At the beginning of January, we're planning to hunker down and polish up everything we've built in recent weeks, and stitch it all together, since our development process involves keeping the game in a stable, shippable state at all times. These kinds of milestones are intense, as the whole game feels like it levels up noticeably in the space of a week or so.

We're not too far from being content-complete, after which we intend to spend months polishing everything up well in time for our planned release date in the summer of next year. When we squint, we can see what looks like it might be the light at the end of the tunnel, not that we want out of this tunnel anytime soon since it's cool in here.

New screens of new areas: Just posted in a separate update, we've got images of two new areas from the game, the Workmen Ward and the Hanging Gardens. These are 100-percent-jen-u-wine screens taken from our real levels at our native full-HD resolution.

Happy Holidays! Also just wanted to wish you all a happy holiday and best wishes for the New Year, since our next update here will be in January.

It's been an amazing year for us and for Bastion, and we have you guys to thank for a good part of it. When we talk to publishers and platform holders who can get our game onto console platforms like XBLA and PSN, they don't need to take it from us that Bastion has the potential to be something special, they need only look at what everyone else is saying about it. That's been incredibly helpful, and so is the sense that what we really need to do with this game is overdeliver on the positive first impression it's created in people. We're lucky we get to work on something like this and we're going to do everything in our power to make the most of it. Glad you could join us for the ride.

-- GregK

To commemorate reaching more than a thousand followers on Twitter, or maybe by sheer coincidence, we're releasing two new images of some of the environments from Bastion's first chapter. Click for full-size and read on for more details.

Hardly anyone had ever heard of Supergiant Games until we announced Bastion just a few months ago. We wanted to take a moment to thank you for supporting us -- I mean, we haven't even released a game yet so we hardly deserve it. We're better off for it, that's for sure. One of the many important aspects of independent game development is having the courage of one's convictions to keep pushing in directions that may not be proven or obvious, and having that courage all the time is easier knowing lots of people out there are interested in what we're making here. We'll continue doing everything in our power to make sure the game lives up to all the promise you see in it, and then some. For now, here's a look at two new locations:

Top - The Workmen Ward: Even the industrial areas of the City of Caelondia were pristine, thanks to the windbags working the Workmen Ward. This is one of the first areas you'll visit in Bastion, and it's the first time the game starts to open up a lot more in terms of where you can go. You'll learn more about the windbags and why they're being none too social these days. Also here you can see the Kid wielding the War Machete, a weapon that's faster and in some ways even more versatile than his trusty Cael Hammer.

Bottom - The Hanging Gardens: The Hanging Gardens used to be one of Caelondia's most popular recreation areas, with its stunning views and colorful flora. But that was before the Calamity. Here we begin to learn more about the impact of what happened. As you can see the area contrasts sharply with a place like the Workmen Ward, though the areas are in relatively close proximity. Imagine where we're going to take you from there...

By the way, we promise not to spoil any aspects of Bastion's story when showing you these glimpses of the game. Let us know what you think!

-- GregK

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who tuned in for the live show! In case you missed it, you can watch the episode on-demand right here. Witness the surpassing luxury of our workplace!

Be sure to tune in to GiantBomb.com today at 3:30pm Pacific and join Amir, Gavin, Jen, and Greg for the next installment of Building the Bastion, in which our team will take you behind the scenes of the game we're working on and provide a rare glimpse into the world of game development.

This time around we'll be showing the earliest version of Bastion's story-driven campaign, back when it was basically stick figures, text screens, and scanned D&D monsters. Then we'll be showing you a much more recent build, including a first look at a never-before-scene level and our overworld map. Let us know what you think after the show!

Also in case you missed it, Greg gave a live demo of Bastion's prologue earlier this week on GameSpot, so check it out if you want to see the latest version of the game's opening sequence.

We're in the thick of production on the game, building lots of new environments, creatures, weapons, challenges, and stories. Here's a quick glimpse at some of the new encounters we have in store. These are two never-before-released full-HD screenshots taken straight from our custom game engine.

Top Screenshot: If you've been following the game, you've probably seen the Kid pounding away at foes and obstacles alike using the mighty Cael Hammer he once used as a construction tool. The shot on the left is a first look at one of the other melee weapons in the gane, the War Machete. It's much quicker than the hammer and can also be thrown so it doubles as a ranged weapon in a pinch!

Bottom Screenshot: This second shot shows the Sundown Path, one of the more precarious environments early on in the game. You'll have to watch your step throughout Bastion, but even more so than usual in this deceptively pretty-looking locale.

We've got plenty more where these came from. We'll never release screens containing spoilers though we'll be showing you more locations, weapons, and creatures in the months to come.

Hey, here's a rundown of the latest happenings on the good ship H.M.S. Supergiant Games, where the crew's been hard at work building tons of new content for our game Bastion, which we'll be excited to show you very soon.

Bastion Honored as a Top 10 Break Out Indie Game of 2011: We were thrilled to be hand-picked for DIY Gamer's list of the most promising upcoming independent games from among all the inventive and amazing-looking titles now in development. Have a look at the full list, which includes several of our own most anticipated games.

Mark Your Calendars for Building the Bastion Episode 2: On Friday December 3 at 3:30pm Pacific, we'll once again be live on GiantBomb.com showing you the inner workings of an independent game studio and the day-to-day madness that goes into the making of Bastion. This time we're aiming to delve deeper into the narration aspect of the game, plus take you on a tour through our luxurious work environment... yeah. Discuss Bastion on Giant Bomb and let us know what you want to see!

Vote for Bastion as Indie of the Year: If you're not sick of elections yet -- and who isn't?! -- then we surely would appreciate your vote at Indie DB, which is pitting all new and upcoming independent games in a steel cage deathmatch that only popularity can decide.

Bastion Entered into the 2011 Independent Games Festival: About a month ago we submitted an updated version of the game for judging in the IGF, which each year brings us more and more-impressive indie games than ever before. We're excited to be among the hundreds of promising games in the running this year, and whatever happens, we put our best effort into our submission build. Here's our official IGF page. Wish us luck!

Now then, we'd better get back to it. Till next time!

UPDATE: Show's over and we had a great time! If you tuned in, thanks for watching, and if you missed it, then you can watch it on-demand right here.

On behalf of all of us at Supergiant Games, we invite you to join us at Giant Bomb this Friday, October 29 at 3:30pm PST for the premiere episode of Building the Bastion. This live show will take you behind the scenes of our up-and-coming studio while providing an in-depth look at the making of Bastion and insight into life at a small independent game developer. This is a 30-minute live broadcast, available for free to all viewers!

The show will include a first look at never-before-seen new content for Bastion, as well as a first look at never-before-seen old content for Bastion in the form of early gameplay and narrative prototypes. A portion of the show will be dedicated to questions from the audience, which will be taken from Giant Bomb's members-only chat room.

Occasionally we're going to use this space to bring you insight into the thought process and development process behind our first game, Bastion. To kick things off, here's a detailed look at how we're using our reactive narration technique to give the game its specific tone. This article was first posted on Greg Kasavin's personal blog and we're reprinting it here.

On September 2, I officially joined the small team at Supergiant Games as their creative director, and together we showed our game Bastion for the first time at PAX in Seattle. The response was almost overwhelming, and on a personal level it was one of the most rewarding moments of my professional career. Part of the reason for this is that Bastion is a pure expression of many ideas that are close to my heart – ideas about games, stories, and other things that matter to me – so the enthusiastic response really meant a lot. Granted, my contributions to the project are only just beginning in earnest, but because I was involved in developing the original concept back when my colleagues and I parted ways with Electronic Arts in August of last year, I feel much closer to this game than any other thing I've worked on. For now, I wanted to explain how we're approaching the game's use of storytelling through narration.

Narration in Bastion In film, narration is one of the most misused and mood-killing techniques out there, for its unique ability to eliminate the type of ambiguity that adds richness to scenes and characters. While I've often fantasized about being able to read people's minds as a superpower, if movies have taught me anything it's that knowing people's inner monologue would make life far less interesting for someone as neurotic as me.

Nevertheless, Bastion uses real-time narration extensively. Its purpose is to deliver story and exposition, and to build atmosphere, investment, and immersion in close partnership with the gameplay. The narration wasn't part of the original game concept. It was born in a flash of inspiration (through a development process that enables such happy accidents to occur), stemming from a couple of self-imposed constraints. The first constraint was to never interrupt the play experience for the sake of story or for any reason, which meant no cutscenes, no dialogue trees, no pressing the A button to advance through dialogue, and none of the other such trappings that tended to slow the pace of other RPGs. I love many games that do these things, but Bastion just isn't this kind of game. One of the things I miss about games in general is that sense of immediacy that console games used to have (before disc-based media ushered in a new era of loading times and cutscenes), where you'd hit Start and, indeed, start the game. Bastion is meant to be that kind of game. Text-based dialogue wasn't going to work. The team's suspicions about how it would negatively affect the pace of the game turned out to be accurate.

From the outset, before the company was even formed, I wanted to work on a game with some narrative substance and emotional depth, to create an original world with its own characters. We would have these long late-night conversations about how to deliver story in ways only possible through the medium of gaming, because why not? Games should aspire to be games. Cinematics interrupt the play experience no matter how well crafted they are. And as much as I love stepping through dialogue in games like Fire Emblem or Torment, I had to agree that reading lots of text in a game usually isn't a good feeling. All the theorizing needed to be grounded in reality due to the would-be team's small size and limited bandwidth in art and animation. This other constraint meant no elaborate scripted scenes or silent emotive storytelling as in games like Ico or Limbo, where nuanced animation is essential to mood-setting and atmosphere.

Eventually through prototyping and experimentation all this led to the idea of real-time narration, having a narrator who responds to the player's input. From the outset I was interested in having the story begin with a young man rising as if from sleep or from death, to discover a world changed around him in some profound way. The story would start on a mysterious but emotionally low point and expand from there. The intent was to provoke questions for the player immediately, and allow the game to reveal two worlds in parallel: the way things are, and the way things used to be. At any rate, in that waking-up moment, it turns out that just by adding the spoken line "He rose" to coincide with the player's input, it got a lot stronger. (This later changed to the current "He gets up" after further exploration of the narrative style.) This was one of an initial set of lines that our studio co-founder Amir recorded with our audio director Darren and their childhood friend Logan, a theatrical actor who provides the narrator's voice, after Amir suspected that adding narration may bring something positive to the experience. I remember when I first heard it, not knowing what quality it would have, never even having heard Logan's voice before. It felt powerful even inside a low-fidelity prototype. Players don't normally expect this type of output from a game, so it immediately speaks to some of the qualities that are specific to Bastion. The narrator's voice alone says a lot about the game.

The other reason, probably the main reason, Bastion is using narration is because of Logan. In addition to being perfect for the part, Logan offers us one other great advantage: We have access to him. Some people mistook his voice for Ron Perlman's. Let's say we could afford Ron Perlman, lost our minds, and decided he'd be better than Logan for the part. We'd have maybe two or three recording sessions with him for the lifetime of the game. With Logan we can iterate rapidly, and we need to in order to get the narration in the game to feel as closely connected as possible to the moment-to-moment play.

Logan's natural speaking voice is quite different from that of the narrator, though we were always interested in a fantasy-frontier aesthetic, something with some the beautiful-melancholy tone of some of Cormac McCarthy's novels. I also take inspiration from the late William Gaddis, whose novels have characters with such distinctive voices. And so we developed a character who embodies the tone we were interested in. And Logan nailed it.

Bastion's narrator is designed to support our game on a fundamental level. He's a man of few words not only for fictional reasons but also, conveniently, to support a design constraint that we simply can't have him talking a lot during gameplay. Bastion has a very fast feel to it, closer to an action game than a typical action role-playing game. Our narrator needs to be very concise to keep up with the pace.

Five Rules for Writing Bastion Logan can probably make the stupidest combination of words sound awesome. Even still I'm attempting to write good material for him, in the spirit of not wasting the player's time with bloated unnecessary prose. By exploring the character and which types of narration work best for the game, we gain a low-level understanding of the narration in addition to our high-level goals for it. As such, here are the factors I bear in mind when writing for the game:

1. Dialogue is for subtext. The player's actions in the game are the "text", the surface-level things that happen. When the player explores, builds things, attacks things, or acquires items, these are all clear and affordant actions. There was initially a temptation and a novelty in having the narrator declare these actions along the way. But this would mean missing the point of why we have the narrator in the game. This would have resulted in that brand of movie-style narration I dislike so much.

Our narrator deepens the player's interactions by saying something about them that the player could not have known. He provides character intent, subplot, and backstory through his comments. The ultimate goal with every line is for it to tell you something about the player character, the narrator, the way the world is, and the way the world used to be. For example, the first item you find in the game is a large sledgehammer, to which the narrator says, "Kid finds his lifelong friend." You can see that it's a hammer so you don't need the narrator to point that out, but through the narration you can deduce that the protagonist has history with this hammer and that the narrator knows it. Further, through the narrator's particular delivery you sense that this history has had its ups and downs. Using this type of narration, we gradually build the backstory in the context of the player's immediate actions and surroundings – I would never expect you to care about something that wasn't onscreen. Following the points in my GDC presentation, I mean to deliver on the major questions raised in the game, but moment-to-moment this type of narration should give a sense of a detailed world that existed before you started playing the game.

2. Keep it short. Our narrator is a storyteller but a terse man. Unlike me he doesn't waste his breath, and that's fortunate because our environments are packed with detail and leave no room for long speeches. In order to achieve the moment-to-moment reactive feel we want from the narration, the lines have to be short. Our narrator has a flair for the dramatic and speaks in a low flat voice, so tonally the lines tend to fit well together even if there's a lot of silence in between statements. These were factors in the character design.

3. No breaking the fourth wall. One of the most exciting aspects of having a narrator in our game are all the opportunities to break from player expectations, and raise a lot of interesting questions over time. A temptation in all this is to have the narrator address the player directly or step out of the story and break into metafiction, maybe tutorialize the game by telling you when to press and hold the X button and so forth. But it didn't take long to realize this wasn't going to work. As mentioned earlier on, our high-level goals include building immersion and investment. If the narrator were to break the fourth wall, we might get a momentary gag out of it but we'd be undermining the experience we want to achieve by violating the player's expectations around the game's own logic. We have a cleaner way of training players, and as with everything else, the narrator is there to reinforce those moments without stepping on them.

4. Reward experimentation and playing with finesse. Our narrator provides a great reward system, provided players like what he does for the game. I want players to develop a relationship with him as a character and to feel like they can provoke certain types of comments out of him. This happens to be well in line with the type of play experience we want to deliver, one where players feel like they can do whatever they want in the world, experiment with all the different systems and weapons, explore a bit off the beaten path, and so on. Having the narrator specifically acknowledge these moments tends to provide positive reinforcement in a natural way. We realized the closest thing to what we were going for were some of our favorite announcers in games from completely different genres, from the announcer screaming "BOOM-SHAKALAKA" after an awesome dunk in NBA JAM to Shao Khan saying "Excellent" after a ferocious uppercut in Mortal Kombat (both games were done by Midway in their glory days). The key difference is our narrator isn't quipping, he's telling a contiguous story for the most part. Having him sneak in a few incidental remarks based on the player's choices or performance helps make the whole thing feel personal and specific.

5. No repeats. When done properly, our real-time narration starts to take on the quality of a story unfolding, and starts to get at those high-level goals we want to achieve. But nothing sucks the momentum out of the game's narrative like a repeated line. Almost every game uses repetitious dialogue even if it's got tens of thousands of lines of dialogue in it; combat encounters will repurpose enemy battle chatter and so on. With Bastion we realized that the moment any line repeated itself – for example, our narrator has different things to say if the player falls off a ledge – immersion is broken. You realize in that moment that you're playing a game where the narrator might loop through a host of different lines after a specific event, as in a real-time strategy game where your units will cycle through several responses whenever you issue an order. So we drew a line in the sand: No repeats in the game, not unless you replay the game from the start or restart a scenario from scratch (and even then we mix up the narration). This posed certain design challenges, such as what happens if a player revisits certain areas, but we're happily taking those on in the spirit of maintaining the feel we're going for.

Conclusion If there's one main underlying point in all this, it's that everything we're doing with the narration in Bastion is there only to support the specific type of play experience we're making. Everything from how the narrator character sounds and how he talks came about purposefully as part of the exploration around gameplay concepts and game themes. Bastion is hardly the first game to use narration to deliver story, so we never set out to pursue the idea of having a narrator purely for the sake of being different. Instead, we're pursuing it because we realized it worked well for the game we wanted to make and for the process we're using to make it.