Following the release of their previous game,
Pyre, Supergiant Games was interested in opening up their development process, intending to use player feedback to improve both gameplay and narrative elements. The studio thus opted for an
early access approach in developing
Hades, after establishing the game's foundation. As Supergiant was still a small team of about 20 employees, they knew they could only support early access across one platform, with the intent to port to other platforms near the completion of the game. Supergiant had spoken to
Epic Games and learned of their intent to launch their own
Epic Games Store, and felt the experimental platform was an appropriate match with
Hades. Supergiant's decision was made in part due to Epic's focus on content creators, as Supergiant had developed
Hades in mind to be a game favorable to streamers, which would be benefited through the Epic Games Store. For the setting, Supergiant considered revisiting the worlds from their previous games but felt a wholly new setting would be better. Supergiant's creative director
Greg Kasavin came onto the idea of
Greek mythology, a topic he had been interested in since his youth. During a development break, Kasavin researched more into Greek myths and found that Hades was underrepresented in these stories, as the Olympians feared him. This discovery led Kasavin towards having the game centered on Zagreus attempting to escape from Hades and the Underworld as a more interesting narrative approach. In contrast to
Bastion and
Transistor, which were more linear games and thus had more control over how the player progressed,
Hades presented the challenge of writing dialog for the multitude of routes the player could progress in the game. Kasavin and his writers drafted out about ten hours' worth of dialog between Zagreus and the non-player characters based on a large number of potential chained events that could happen to the player. For example, while in a run, the player may encounter
Eurydice, and on return to the main hub after failing the run, meet Eurydice's husband
Orpheus, who, because of that prior meeting, asks the player to deliver a message to Eurydice the next time they encounter her. The game also explores the diverse sexuality that was present in the Greek myths; Zagreus is
bisexual and in certain routes polyamorous, while one side narrative explores the
gay relationship between
Achilles and Patroclus. During the development process of
Hades, Supergiant decided to rewrite their custom
game engine to provide better game performance and better cross platform support. Their original engine, which was written in
C# and used the Microsoft XNA framework, had been used by the studio for all of their games since
Bastion. While making
Hades, due to the technical limitations and difficulties of hardware porting and other performance aspects, Supergiant decided to rewrite their engine using
C++ based on the framework The Forge to benefit from the increased performance that
native code provides.
Audio ==Release==