Devs explore the creative challenges faced when making a studio's second game

- Greg Kasavin explores how his creative process shifted while working on Supergiant’s first, second, and eventual third game.  

In the sixth story in the Art of Fiction series, Campo Santo co-founder Sean Vanaman recounted a conversation he shared with Supergiant Games writer and designer Greg Kasavin about the creative struggles of following your own success when creating a studio’s second or even third game. 

As he began work on Campo Santo's second title, Vanaman had hoped the conversation with Kasavin would give him “that golden nugget of insight” about how lessons learned writing a studio’s first game would make creating its second one easier, but that nugget never came.

Instead Kasavin shared his own advice and experiences with writing, and spoke about how working on Supergiant’s second game Transistor was actually more difficult than working on its first.

“Getting to Transistor’s story and characters was really just much, much more difficult and slower-going than it was in the case of Bastion. It was just something that took more time, and that was something that I personally often took hard,” said Kasavin. 

“Because when you’re the writer you can’t help but take some of that personally. You want to do work that’s on the level of work you’ve done in the past and you don’t want to be struggling on things that were less of a struggle in the past.”

The full conversation shared over on Campo Santo’s Quarterly Review explores these ideas and feelings more in-depth, and offers both insightful words about the unique struggles faces by creatives in any field and guiding thoughts on how to deal with both positive and negative feedback.