LO: My Inspiration

The project I’d like to talk about is Supergiant Games’ Hades, a video game where you play as Zagreus, Prince of the Underworld, on a quest to battle his way out of the Underworld and meet his mother. It was named the 2020 Game of the Year, and is a rogue-like dungeon crawler meaning principally 2 things: 1. Progress is reset when you die, 2. Each run is different because the sequence of rooms you go through is randomized.

Rogue-likes are notorious for being mechanically difficult and requiring alot of repetition to master and ultimately enjoy. Despite this, Supergiant managed to implement a rather sophisticated and intricate dialogue tier system a involving a cast of 29 characters and 20000 unique lines of voiced dialogue. The integrated storytelling, beautiful art style, atmospheric soundtrack, combined with the baseline permanent progression and customizable build systems, bolster the games’ replayability such that even 2 years later people are still playing and producing content centered around Hades’.

The development time for Hades was 3 years, which is standard for the video game industry. Supergiant is a small independent indie game company based in San Francisco, comprised of around 20 people.

The thing that is astounding about the Supergiant team is that they do not ‘crunch’, or undergo compulsory overtime during game development, which is another industry standard. Their approach to project management and internal team relations are well planned out, flexible and healthy, resulting in a high employee retention rate, which is incredibly rare.

Almost all notable assets are either custom or created in-house, from the art to the music to even the game engine which is based on the Microsoft XNA framework, written in C# and was rewritten for better game performance and cross platform support during the development of Hades.

Hades is described as “a reaction to Pyre, which was a reaction to Transistor, which was a reaction to Bastion”, all of which are the studio’s previous games and inform different aspects of the game, from overall workflow and anti-burnout failsafes, to the top-down isometric camera position, to the idea of continuing narration and story across multiple attempts, to offering different abilities.

Given the way the team approaches games and game design, the next game Supergiant will release will develop on the themes, mechanics and storytelling devices explored in Hades and their previous projects, such as dungeon-crawlers and procedural room generation, or non-linear storytelling. Which one exactly that will be, is difficult to say, as Supergiant have yet to release any details on their blog.

Authors: Supergiant Games (Amir Rao, Gavin Simon, Darren Korb, Jen Zee, Greg Kasavin, Andrew Wang, Logan Cunningham, Josh Barnett, John-Paul Gabler, Dexter Friedman, Eduardo Gorinstein, Alice Lai, Joanne Tran, Caitlin Sales, Will Turnbull, Nikola Sobajic, Devansh Maheshwari, James Auck, Allison Rassmann, Ellis Powell, Morgane Malville, Craig Harris)

References:
https://www.supergiantgames.com/blog/hades-faq
https://gamerant.com/hades-developer-infographic-dialogue-breakdown/https://kotaku.com/the-secret-to-the-success-of-bastion-pyre-and-hades-1838082618
https://gamerant.com/hades-developer-supergiant-games-upcoming-projects-long-wait/
https://kotaku.com/the-secret-to-the-success-of-bastion-pyre-and-hades-1838082618