BioShock Infinite's dancing bread boy is the start of some good game dev tales
rockpapershotgun.comA boy dancing around the streets of Paris waving a baguette over his head in BioShock Infinite holds a surprising amount of secrets and stories. Over the weekend, the former Irrational developer who placed the meme-ified Baguette Boy in Binfinite's Burial At Sea expansion explained why he's there. It's an interesting story about how weird game development it is, how weird games themselves are as technical objects, and about creativity within technical constraints.
Like a lot of good stories on the Internet, it started with razzing:
random sensory flashback to the Bioshock Infinite DLC where they wanted to communicate to the player "you are in Paris, France" so they put a little kid in the game dancing around in the street while holding a baguette over his head pic.twitter.com/E77jzW0Air
With this tweet blowing up, someone tagged in Gwen Frey, who was behind Baguette Boy when she worked at Irrational. She went on to explain the birth of bread-bearing boogieboy in a Twitter thread.
Frey explained that part of her work on Binfinite and its DLC was placing all the background characters. Because every character comes at a performance cost, many of these were "chumps" without AI, without the ability to pathfind around, just bodies looping animations with a few flourishes like voice lines.
Wanting to add more motion to the scene but not having the performance leeway for another AI walking around, she "figured a chump running in a circle around that cylinder could work since I could just expand the collision of it to prevent the player from running through them." She hit upon the idea to re-use an NPC animation from the scene where NPCs dance around Elizabeth in Battleship Bay, using kids because "a couple randomly dancing
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