The Creative Process

The Creative Process is the fourth of the collectible Golden Film Reels, featuring director's commentary with Ken Levine and Shawn Robertson, hosted by Geoff Keighley. The Golden Film Reels are exclusive to the remastered version of BioShock, part of BioShock: The Collection.
==Location==
In the Farmer's Market in Worley Winery in the shack on the bottom floor with the Photographer's Eye Gene Tonic and Trap Bolts.
==Transcript==
Finding the film reel in-game gives the following warning: SPOILER WARNING: The commentary contains in-depth discussion of plot details, including the ending. First-time players may wish to complete the game before viewing.
The host is Geoff Keighley.
Ken Levine's given credits are: Creative Director: System Shock 2, BioShock, BioShock, BioShock Infinite.
Shawn Robertson's given credits are: Animation Lead / Director: BioShock, BioShock Infinite.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Opening scene of the game, Jack opens his wallet to look at a photograph; player observes Brigid Tenenbaum behind the glass in Tenenbaum's Sanctuary in Olympus Heights; player sees the shadow of Rose against the wall in the beginning of Neptune's Bounty; player encounters Andrew Ryan leaning with his golf club in the Office of Andrew Ryan in Rapture Central Control; player rescues the first Little Sister in the Medical Pavilion; player uses Electro Bolt and a Pistol to disable an enemy Security Bot in the ground floor of the Eternal Flame Crematorium in the Medical Pavilion; player uses Telekinesis to throw a grenade back at a Nitro Splicer in Emergency Access in the Medical Pavilion]
KEIGHLEY: Nailing the perfect marriage of story to gameplay is a science that many developers still struggle with today. BioShock has left an indelible mark on gaming narrative that can be seen and felt in many modern releases, but Irrational’s motto remained from the beginning: "Don’t start with the story, start with the gameplay."
[TITLE SCREEN: IMAGINING BIOSHOCK - THE CREATIVE PROCESS - HOSTED BY GEOFF KEIGHLEY]
KEIGHLEY: Lot of fans probably wonder about the process you go through in writing the story and the design for a game like BioShock. You've talked about how you know it evolved over time and what eventually ships is a very different thing then your initial vision. Do you guys write like a script or a design document for the game and that becomes sort of the bible that everyone drives towards or, or do you iterate much more?
LEVINE: It's different for every game like System Shock 2 I wrote, I-I went back to it recently, I wrote a design document. And like we started that project in September and the design document I saw was dated like October or something so in like a month like I wrote the design document and it-it didn't change. A lot of it, you know, got expanded upon but the basic design really didn't change on that, where on s-, where on BioShock I think it evolved in real-time much more. Like the, we had a pretty substantial design shift like a year before the ship date...
KEIGHLEY: For BioShock?
LEVINE: BioShock, yeah. It, it got to be much more about the experience of being in Rapture than about being in your character sheet and so the game evolved more towards that experiential kind of thing and making sure every idea was expressed in the world as well as just on your character sheet. So before you'd have a lot of things like, oh I'm doing fire damage or electrical damage. But that was sort of a number flying off a head versus, you know, the whole notion of like, you know, uh, you, there is barrels and you light them on fire and then you can pick them up and throw them...
KEIGHLEY: But you'd have stats coming off characters and all that stuff?
LEVINE: Yeah, much more so.
KEIGHLEY: Oh really, huh.
LEVINE: And that evolved, you know, sort of. We did a, a design shift, but I don't know well that got documented. I think we were moving so fast that it just, we were just sort of changing things, you know, you know, laying down, laying down the tracks as we went right ahead of us. The same with the screenplay you know the screenplay. The screenplay say, there is no screenplay, it's a bunch of, you know, probably Excel files and fragments of Word documents that I'd write and I'd go to, uh, recording sessions and I'd rewrite on the fly once I heard the actor perform because once the actor takes on it you listen to their voice and you say, "You know what you wrote doesn't really matter." What is this guy, what is the right thing for this actor playing this role to be saying? So I tend to do a lot of rewriting in the session and then like you have a bug late at night where somebody says, "Oh this doesn't make any sense." And you're like 'Oh God'. And you have to write a new audio log and try to get the actor back in or you figure out how to, what's the best way to get this idea across and is it an audio log? Is it a poster on the wall?
ROBERTSON: Yeah.
LEVINE: Is it, is it a piece of text that pops up on the screen? You know, that's always dependent on how much time you have and what actor availability is so, y-you know, the plans sort of fall apart. Um, I think we've-we worked on that a bunch since on the new project we're working on. Where, you know, we-we're trying to document things a lot better and keep things a lot more logical, but the train was running so fast on BioShock that we just sort of...
ROBERTSON: And we early on we got the, the Andrew Ryan scene in like we'd said before and that was kind of like the keystone.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player encounters Andrew Ryan leaning with his golf club as he walks off in the Office of Andrew Ryan in Rapture Central Control]
ROBERTSON: Like we're going to put a lot of work into this so this can't change. Everything that happens before or after that don't really involve a lot of departments working together to make a scene, those things are very malleable and if you need to change audio logs to represent a story or if you need to add lines or take away lines that's, that's very doable and I think for a while we even had like text-to-speech.
LEVINE: We even did that in, I remember for Infinite with Booker and Elizabeth in all their dialogue and that really didn't work very well cause you'd have these dramatic scenes and it'd be like, [robotic voice] "Elizabeth you need; We need to go to Comstock." And, and it just, just...
ROBERTSON: Yeah. At some point it does fall apart though. Yeah.
LEVINE: It, it, it almost had no value as far as I was concerned.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player bangs Wrench on the door to Fontaine Fisheries in Neptune's Bounty, Peach Wilkins slides the peephole open, Peach: "Atlas radioed on ahead. Says you were looking for an invite to the fisheries. Nuts, I say. But if'n you heads up to the wharf master's office and find ol' Peach a Research Camera, maybe I could manage an invite."]
KEIGHLEY: Ken has so much of, you know, these games in his head and you're sort of, you know, y-you can keep it all straight or try to with all the different things and changes, but from the team perspective, Shawn, I mean how, because this is evolving and Ken's thinking in his head about how this all ties together, um, how does the team, sort of, keep up with you know w-what the whole game is going to look like?
ROBERTSON: There's a lot of specifics that can change. For instance, um, Atlas used to have a Southern drawl and then you know we, we recast to the, uh, Irish...
LEVINE: And we, we actually, we actually cast an actor, wrote the lines, did the whole thing, and realized that people hated that character and distrusted him from the first start. So we had to rewrite him, recast him, redo everything.
ROBERTSON: Yeah, from a team perspective, you kind of get a sense on which things are going to be really volatile and that you probably want to push off till later 'cause if you work on it now it might change. Larger things don't tend to change too much meaning we knew we were in Rapture, we knew we had Big Daddies, we knew we had Little Sisters, we knew we had Splicers, we knew what the arc of the story was about Jack coming into Rapture.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player walks on the bridge above the Tea Garden in Arcadia; player approaches the Rapture Metro station in Arcadia until Andrew Ryan releases poison gas into the air]
ROBERTSON: And the, the specifics of this radio log versus that radio log didn't really affect anyone outside the, the audio team at that time because we could still build the environment. We still knew what the environment was, we still knew what the animations were. There are areas you learn just by working in the same space for a while, that this, this scene I'm not touching this yet 'cause I know that it-it's-it's gonna get changed a lot. I think these themes are pretty nailed down so I'm gonna focus the team on, on getting these things done.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player enters the Bathysphere Station in Welcome to Rapture, Atlas: "I won't leave you twisting in the wind. We're gonna need to draw her out of hiding. But you're gonna have to trust me."]
KEIGHLEY: The audio logs were, you know, a great part of the game and something that if you're a true fan, I mean, people really going, go in and listen to those and piece that all together. But I imagine there is a lot of work that goes into deciding, you know, well this, this is better for an audio log versus game dialogue and you know there's the act of sort of cutting back and sort of saying, you know, we need to be clear about what the narrative is for the game. What was that process like I mean the audio logs, were there things you added at the end or were those, you know, ideas that you had for the game but then sort of said, "Hey, maybe we'll demote these a little bit and make them audio logs."?
LEVINE: As Shawn was saying there's sort of a hierarchy of expense that you, you have to face and so any ideas you have to get across.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player enters through the doors of Langford Research Laboratories and several of its rooms in Arcadia]
LEVINE: Especially as you start playing the game you realize well this doesn't make sense, that doesn't make sense. You have to figure out w-, how you can introduce that idea and generally it's the train is moving, you try to think of cheaper and cheaper ways to get those ideas across. If it's less important it goes to an audio log.
If it's less important, it goes to a poster on the wall, um...
ROBERTSON: Well, there's also characters that you can bring in that have audio logs that aren't, you know, Atlas, Tenenbaum, those are your big ones.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player exits Langford Research Laboratories and sees the poisoned trees in Arcadia]
ROBERTSON: Uh, you can bring in somebody to do a short, you know, few, different audio logs. It's a character that some players may not even find...
KEIGHLEY: Right.
ROBERTSON: ...but it adds a little bit of depth to, to Rapture, um...
LEVINE: And, and, and it also like usually characters. Each character generally is a, about a certain idea and they're not, we don't just sort of come up with characters. Like we have an idea problem that we need to solve so let's introduce a character who-who's this guy and he will be the guy who sort of shepherds you through that i-idea.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player picks up the Bee Enzyme audio diary in front of the sign to the Farmer's Market and continues through the door to the glass tunnel overlooking the Silverwing Apiary and Worley Winery: "Julie, my dear, I am trying to run a business here. You wanna spend time with my honey bees, well, I'm gonna have to start charging you for the pleasure. If I come out one more time and find you lolling out there amongst my hives, I'm grabbing my shotgun. As to your question, yes, my days in beekeeping school are a blur, but I do seem to remember something about that enzyme you keep blabbing on about."]
KEIGHLEY: So as you're going through the game and, you know, writing things, rewriting things, were there things with the original BioShock that you-you've always been surprised that more people didn't pick up on or was there something, that you know, a c-connection to a character you thought was really going to resonate with people which, you know, didn't? Anything like that?
LEVINE: No it's the opposite. Um, I was amazed and I don't know how you felt, but I was amazed how many people connected to the Would you Kindly stuff like...
ROBERTSON: Yeah.
LEVINE: Because I think it was a real, when I wrote that speech, I don't think anybody on the team was like "Oh my God!" this is really this or that. And I don't think I really had any sense that people were going to connect to it. I think we ended up sort of over time finding more ways to support the notion throughout the game.
ROBERTSON: Yup.
LEVINE: Um, and I don't think I really f-, until I heard Pat put together the, the, the revelation moment, you know...
ROBERTSON: Yeah.
LEVINE: Where it was like you had all the bits that Atlas had said to you in the past building up and then there was a visual that went along with that. That's when I realized it was going to be a really powerful moment, but even so I still was, did I think people really gonna connect to it or really even understand it because it's pretty out there, um...
ROBERTSON: Yeah.
LEVINE: And that it was meta commentary too. I think that completely s-, I-I think I thought, "Oh, it's kind of meta, cool". And but people connected to it in a much bigger way...
KEIGHLEY: Oh yeah, the choice and age generally and also just you know being able to kind of roll back and think of all those other moments throughout the game. I mean like it's you know...
ROBERTSON: Yeah.
KEIGHLEY: ...a great revelation like that, they're few and far between in games where you're sort of like, then you want to it play again it goes like and oh wow really that, those all make sense, right?
ROBERTSON: Yeah I mean the thing is the team, we were definitely proud of what we had done, but at up to that point, you know, SWAT 4 was the biggest game that we worked on and we had no expectation of that anybody would pick this up or even like BioShock cosplay. I remember the first cosplay I saw of the guy in the Big Daddy suit and his little daughter was in the kitchen cabinet. I think that was the first one I saw, I was like, what-woah, people know this stuff? That's insane.
LEVINE: Yeah people were building these outfits and yeah that's only that only expanded with, with Infinite. I mean, that sort of went crazy with Infinite with people cosplaying Elizabeth, the Luteces, and Booker. It meant a lot to, to people and I, I, I don't think that's something we ever saw coming and we're deeply, you know, we're deeply grateful for it because it's one thing to make a game and get good reviews and, and stuff like that. It's another thing to have things that people are having their th- weddings themed around it and there, and there're tattoos and naming their children after characters. You can't plan for that and I think the only way that can happen is if you, if you just make something that, something that you're deeply in love with and passionate about, we were, I can say we were, it was something we were, there was a lot of passion on the team about, but we-we didn't know people were going to, uh, take away what they did.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player encounters Andrew Ryan gesturing with a golf club in the Office of Andrew Ryan in Rapture Central Control, Ryan: "Would you kindly? Would you kindly. Powerful phrase. Familiar phrase?", multiple overlapping instances of instances in BioShock where Atlas says the phrase ending with the "Would You Kindly?" bulletin board, Atlas: "Would you kindly? Would you kindly get this? Would you kindly find that? Would you kindly? Would you kindly? Would you kindly get this? Would you kindly head to Ryan's office and kill the son of a bitch?"]
KEIGHLEY: Part of the challenge of that though is when people love fiction so much that they dive into, you know, every word written, or every audi-audio log, and try and connect all the fiction make sure it all makes sense. Are there any things from that game that you sort of look back it's like, oh wow, like we didn't explain this when we should have or things that fans have misinterpreted over the years?
LEVINE: There are things we think that we could, that we did, that should have or shouldn't have been in the game like I-I-I was never a fan of having two endings and the idea....
KEIGHLEY: That's what the publisher was asking you to sort of have of there, right?
LEVINE: That was the one thing that 2K and they were very hands-off. That was the one thing they insisted on and I-I just, it's not something I really felt was a good idea because they're still limited even though there are multiple they're limited and so that was something that we ended doing. One of the endings was far better than the other one. I mean there's no, there's no, it's clear that I was much more interested in the happier ending with the Little Sisters than I was with the nuclear submarine ending.
ROBERTSON: Yeah.
KEIGHLEY: I think that was, I'm sure part of it was the idea that, you know, this game is, if you're making a choice throughout it. I'm sure, some of the people would like, "Oh well then there has to, it has to be a, a payoff right?"
LEVINE: Right, except the game was really about the lack of choice.
KEIGHLEY: You had no choice.
LEVINE: Without being a choice. So, so that always struck me as attention that was weird but you know, look, at the end of the day they were putting up a lot of the money and, you know, so I-I can't really complain. They weren't dictatorial at all during the development so you, that was the one thing, I, that's a game that I wouldn't have put the boss battle in, the final boss battle.
ROBERTSON: [laughs]
LEVINE: Like w-we seem to end up doing that over and over and over again and every time we start a project I'm like we-, I'm never going to do that again. We're never going to do that again. And we end up doing it.
KEIGHLEY: Right.
LEVINE: We're not good at boss battles and that, you know you're fighting that guy. And look this is...
ROBERTSON: Yeah.
LEVINE: The naked dude. And it just...
ROBERTSON: Yeah.
LEVINE: It just doesn't work, um.
KEIGHLEY: Totally makes sense.
LEVINE: But, um, and it works really, pretty well up til then but then it, it doesn't, just doesn't work. That boss battle is silly.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player inserts the ADAM-harvesting needle into Fontaine's shackled, mutated body in the final level, Fontaine breaks free knocking the player away, Fontaine: "Come and get it, mook!"]
Category:Golden Film Reels