Bastion's canceled feature: 'Find a shoe? Plant it.'

Supergiant Games spent one year working on a "rich gardening feature" for Bastion that the entire team was "really excited about," but was eventually cut from the game, designer Amir Rao said at GDC. The final version of Bastion demonstrates the team's obsession with plants, but gardening itself was set to play a pivotal role in exploration and players' overall sense of accomplishment, Rao said, breaking it down into four functions:

1. Players would find seeds for story items and worlds
2. Planters on the Bastion would open up gradually, limiting how many seeds could be planted
3. Plants would be watered with blue "cores"
4. They would sprout and the fruit would offer its item, world, etc.

Gardening in Bastion faced a slew of problems, but mostly the seeds had no aesthetic connection to the final plant -- "What does a 'hammer plant' look like?" Rao asked -- and Supergiant eventually realized that they were solving the wrong problem. What Bastion really needed was a menu.