10/25/2022 0 Comments Bioshock 2 audio diariesThey would just run around and hit you with their drill,” Gaynor says, chuckling at the memory. “So there was one day where we definitely had some Little Daddies in the game, which were just Big Daddies that were scaled down to knee-height. Gaynor says that because they used BioShock’s Unreal 2.5 engine, they discovered that characters like the Big Daddies and Little Sisters could be infinitely scaled for fun and amusement. “We had multiple programmers working on each aspect of programming, and we joked that we had a Left Hand and a Right Hand programmer - one for weapons and one for the plasmids. Moving from that level of specialization to being the sole programmer on a project was a huge learning experience and really required a lot of - let's say 'efficient' programming practices." Shocky storiesīut of course, any story about game development can’t be complete without tales of easter eggs or jokes the designers and programmers snuck into the game for each other-and figuring out which ones actually made it out the door. “On BioShock 2, I had a very small niche,” Nordhagen points out. Bioshock 2 audio diaries how to#Nordhagen later gave a GDC talk, "The Programming of Gone Home: How to Succeed by Being Lazy," about transitioning transitioning away from AAA to indie development with the team at The Fullbright Company. Luckily, we knew that this technology had already shipped one game.” "I was also the UI programmer on the game, and the UI was developed using a weird Flash library for Unreal that had stopped being supported a few years before. “Working with that was really an interesting challenge," says Nordhagen. ‘A heavily modified Unreal 2.5’ was the most common way I heard it described,” he says. “The sequel was using an engine that had been frozen in time sometime back during the development of the original game. Johnnemann Nordhagen, now the founder of Dim Bulb Games, says that the game’s engine, while successful, came with its own unique challenges. It helped give the game its defining aesthetic, but also presented a unique set of challenges for its programmers. The first two BioShock games famously ran on a heavily modified version of a game engine that was first released in 1998. “There's also something in there about the period authenticity, and how much of that can actually go across to a modern player and how much can be put in for feel and atmosphere,” she says. Zimonja says that the audio diaries of BioShock 2 were a good guide for figuring out the timing of how long audio narrative segments in Gone Home needed to be to hold the player’s attention. “It has this architecture that leads you along a path without feeling like it's linear.” “The house in Gone Home is effectively built like a BioShock level,” Gaynor says. Zimonja and Gaynor (who joined up with Nordhagen after BioShock 2 was finished to found The Fullbright Company) say that if there’s one big lesson they carried over from BioShock into their own work, it’s how to use level design to both tell a story and shape the player’s ability to guide themselves through the space. In commemoration of the 2010 BioShock sequel, we reached out to former 2K Marin developers Steve Gaynor, Karla Zimonja, Johnnemann Nordhagen and Kent Hudson to share memories from the games development as well as design lessons learned on the game that they still apply to their work today. While we were all too happy to revisit the world’s first glimpse of Rapture ourselves, it’s also worth remembering that its successor BioShock 2 also had a huge impact on the world of game development. As many have noted, BioShock 2 was a clear precursor so-called "walking simulators" like Gone Home and Firewatch.
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