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At one point last year’s Xbox Live Arcade summer highlight (and 9/10 grabbing) Bastion had its own gardening mechanic.
Speaking at a GDC 2012 panel, studio director Amir Rao mentioned how Bastion’s “rich and exciting” gardening features had been worked on for a year, before being removed shortly before the game’s debut at PAX 2010.
Gardening in Bastion would work in the following way: you’d find seeds throughout the game’s levels, and then plant them when back at the Bastion. These plants would then be watered by collecting cores (which would go on to become a central component of the finished game) and these would eventually sprout into plants that would give players a binary choice.
Why did all this work? Because “Bastion has magic soil.”
Gardening didn’t make it into the final game for numerous reasons, such as the fact “players had no idea what was happening” with the system. There was also no aesthetic connection between the plants and the players or, as Rao puts it, “our art director was constantly tasked with drawing a hammer plant, but what does a hammer plant look like?”
“We were solving the wrong problem,” says Rao. “We were tackling this huge thing, we were trying to make this one thing be everything.”
So what did Supergiant Games eventually settle on? “You know the one thing that people understand a lot better than planting? A menu. A menu is something that’s a good place to make decisions at and understand what’s going on,” said Rao.
