Rapture's Denizens

Rapture's Denizens is the eighth 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==
On a couch in the Rapture Metro Bathysphere station in Apollo Square.
==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: Player enters the door to the Lower Wharf in Neptune's Bounty; player observes the Bouncer and the Little Sister in the adjourning glass tunnel on the way to the Surgery in the Medical Pavilion; player observes a Bouncer climbing the stairs in Hephaestus; player attacks a Bouncer with the Grenade Launcher in Upper Heat Loss Monitoring in Hephaestus]
KEIGHLEY: Iconic and haunting. The Big Daddy and Little Sisters of BioShock immediately captivated the public's imagination. Big Daddy encounters defined the BioShock experience creating new mechanics and techniques that have not been seen before in gaming.
[TITLE SCREEN: IMAGINING BIOSHOCK - RAPTURE'S DENIZENS - HOSTED BY GEOFF KEIGHLEY]
KEIGHLEY: So Big Daddy, Little Sister. Such an iconic moment or series of moments in this game. I'm, I'm fascinated about how that got layered in. 'Cause we talked a lot about the setting and the tone. That is still to me, you know, a mechanic that I remember that was very unique about, you know, choosing to engage the Big Daddy and being a fight that you know is gonna be very aggressive and different than, than you know a traditional boss fight. I know you had an idea, Ken, of sort of 3 different types of AIs interacting in the same world.
LEVINE: Yeah, we were sort of like trying to, I was trying to think of like AIs you hadn't seen before. And this was still pretty early, like, like 10 years ago, a lot has changed in 10 years. So like AIs were still pretty much enemies who saw you and came after you.
KEIGHLEY: Zigzag. Shoot.
LEVINE: Yup and then that was really the focus is how you make them, you know, rese-, AI better at you.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player regains consciousness in the Lounge of Welcome to Rapture, a Little Sister and a Bouncer enter into view]
LEVINE: You know, where so, I starting thinking about are there more primal behaviors to think about and I was watching a nature show one day. You know these typical nature shows and it's like the "Watch the, observe the mother tiger taking care of her young." You know, one of those kind of things and I realized that we don't even need a narrator on those shows. We understand certain behaviors by looking at them, they're very primal, like somebody protecting their young. Predator-prey behavior. Those things were very, you don't need dialog for that.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Early BioShock test footage: early prototype Bouncer with flat drills attached to hands walks around and bangs them on the floor at the player walks closer; prototype Bouncer rushes towards player and blindly swings; prototype Bouncer grinds flat drills against each other]
LEVINE: And AIs at that point, we didn't have the ability to do a lot of sort of d-, you know smart AI. So I said, "What if their behaviors are just very primal and we can, we can model those behaviors?" So aggro roles is something we knew we could model, right? You know, how does a, how does an AI aggro on you, what are the rules for that? Could they make a aggression display, um, rather than just attack. And, uh, and can another character appear afraid and r-, and hide behind the skirts of another character?
[SCENE OVERLAY: The following pieces of concept art by Nate Wells and Robb Waters are shown: ]
Early Hydraulic Bouncer Concept Art.jpg|Rendered in black and white.
Clittlesister.png|Additional title text: "Gatherer."
LEVINE: And we started talking about these things and the Big Daddy became very quickly the actual form of the Big Daddy became very quickly as sort of this protector creature. The Little Sister took a lot longer, ironically even though it's a much simpler notion in a lot of ways. The initial idea came out of sort of watching a nature show and trying to work within our constraints of making, we didn't have, we couldn't make super complex AIs.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player watches an angry Bouncer through a window attacking a Leadhead Splicer in the Footlight Theater in Welcome to Rapture, Bouncer drills him against the wall and throws the body through the window, Atlas: "That's the Big Daddy. She gathers ADAM, he keeps her safe.", Little Sister and Big Daddy exit the theater]
ROBERTSON: It was when we first got the system up and running, this was before the, the playtest, we weren't really thinking about player facing these things. And we had this entire system set up that completely simulated what would happen.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player observes a Bouncer fighting and killing Spider Splicers in the main atrium of Fort Frolic]
ROBERTSON: And you'd play through the vertical slice. You'd walk in a room and everybody's dead because the system had worked perfectly.
LEVINE: The Big Daddy put his hat in the corner, they...
ROBERTSON: And you weren't there to see the fight, yeah.
LEVINE: And then, and we track all the, well they weren't called Little Sisters at the time, but then we track how much they were harvesting. And it was all like a Command and Conquer level simulation. And players didn't care or notice. So we just abandoned all that stuff.
ROBERTSON: Yeah so that, that took us a step towards, you know, how do we present this to the player? And how do we make the, the gatherers, which were, we called them at the time before the Little Sister design came on. Like how do we make them empathetic towards the player? How do we make the player want to engage with that? 'Cause at the time they were just slugs.
KEIGHLEY: Right.
ROBERTSON: Which was a horrible design.
KEIGHLEY: That's right, because the Little Sisters originally were slugs right? And actually...
ROBERTSON: Yeah, which is a horrible design in so many ways because you don't care about slugs.
KEIGHLEY: Right.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Early BioShock test footage: Primitive Big Daddy design kneels protectively over a slug which crawls on the floor; slug crawls towards primitive Big Daddy which preens over it]
ROBERTSON: And they're also on the ground so you don't see them. They're not like at eye level and they're dark. So it was...
LEVINE: But you still have this other way, so the, the, the trailer had like the same, or not the trailer, the demo or prototype we did still had the Big Daddy sort of like, [reerh] interacting with the little slug.
KEIGHLEY: Yeah so the slugs crawl around the Big Daddy or?
ROBERTSON: No.
LEVINE: No, it's, it's, it's this awful little mesh.
ROBERTSON: That's a little specification...
KEIGHLEY: Right.
LEVINE: It's like a little beetle sorta.
KEIGHLEY: Uh-huh.
ROBERTSON: Yeah, yeah.
LEVINE: It was terrible.
KEIGHLEY: And they were protecting them?
ROBERTSON: And they had uh...
LEVINE: Protecting the beetles.
KEIGHLEY: The beetles, what?
LEVINE: And, and, and they were so un-...
[SCENE OVERLAY: Early BioShock test footage: Early Bouncer with two drills does a strange dance around moving gray scale slugs]
ROBERTSON: And the Big Daddies had two drills. They didn't have a hand so they couldn-, there's no way they could like...
KEIGHLEY: Right. [laughs] It's fascinating to me 'cause like the Little Sister, it's like there's such humanity in it. Which really, you really connect with.
LEVINE: You would, you would think that would be the obvious thing, yeah. 
ROBERTSON: Which seems like the smart thing to go straight to, yeah.
KEIGHLEY: Yeah.
LEVINE: We're not very smart.
KEIGHLEY: [laughs] The, the idea of sort of choosing to engage the Big Daddy, I mean when I was, first time I played the game that was always profound to me. Because you sort of sit there and like, "Am I ready for this? Am I..." And your choice to sort of like you know be kind of opposite of stealth like when you want to be discovered, was that always the mechanic with the Big Daddy?
LEVINE: Yeah, that, that, that was, the idea was that they would have very particular rules about engaging with you that were entirely dependent upon how you, the threat level towards not them, towards the, their creature they were protecting.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player fights the first Big Daddy/Little Sister pair with Incinerate! and the Shotgun in the Funeral Services Area of the Medical Pavilion]
KEIGHLEY: Yeah, that was set and then as you worked through it, I'm sure there were conversations about how difficult do we make these fights and sort of the, the balancing of that and even, you know with the game, you-you don't start off with a Big Daddy fight it's a little ways into the game until you actually get to that so was that, that was sort of debated?
LEVINE: You actually encounter the notion of Big Daddy and Little Sister many times before you actually are freed into an arena where you can actually fight them. You see them.
KEIGHLEY: Yeah, sneaking out, yeah the pipes, yeah.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player observes the Bouncer and the Little Sister in the adjourning glass tunnel on the way to Surgery in the Medical Pavilion; player observes a Little Sister harvesting below while walking on the catwalk above the Footlight Theater in Welcome to Rapture; player sees a Bouncer corpse thrown through the window in the Surgery Lounge in the Medical Pavilion]
LEVINE: You go, you're going, you see them, you see Li-, you see them walking down a hallway, you see well the first time you see a Little Sister she's harvesting and then you see the Big Daddy come and protect her and we realized, it was, it was 4 or 5 sequences we had to do to setup set the stage for these characters and look we were hoping they'd be iconic and people would respond to the way they did because we certainly spent energy on them with the expectation that they'd have an impact, that we really it just as easily could have turned out that nobody gave, nobody cared.
ROBERTSON: I think the actual very first time and not a lot of people see it. There is a Little Sister in the vent in Kashmir Restaurant.
KEIGHLEY: Uh-huh.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player walks towards the vent next to the bathrooms and sees glowing Little Sister eyes appear and vanish in the Kashmir Restaurant in Welcome to Rapture]
ROBERTSON: That if you're looking in the right direction at the right time, you'll see her looking at you and then she'll disappear.
LEVINE: It's just the, her eyes?
KEIGHLEY: Just the eyes, right?
ROBERTSON: No it's the, it's the actual mesh.
LEVINE: Is it the mesh?
ROBERTSON: Because it was easier to do that than new eyes, but yeah.
LEVINE: Right. [laughs]
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player rescues the first Little Sister in the Lounge in Surgery in Welcome to Rapture, Little Sister: "No, no! No, no! Thank you.", Tenenbaum: "The path of the righteous is not always easy."]
KEIGHLEY: The thing w-, as you play through the game, uh you know, I think the moments, uh, with those sort of encounters certainly, stand out to the, um, to the player. For you guys as you were developing it, was there a debate about how often to sort of have those encounters? Like you know like how many Big Daddies would there be? How would that play out? I mean was that something that sort of changed as you dealt...?
LEVINE: No I think we decided there was going to be 3. I think 3 per level.
KEIGHLEY: Yeah.
ROBERTSON: 3 and 2 in smaller levels. We did have a third Big Daddy that was mostly finished, but we-we couldn't make it fun, like that last 10% of an AI is always like "Where is the fu-, like how do you really make...?"
KEIGHLEY: Uh-huh. Yeah different...
LEVINE: Did they put, I think they put it into BioShock 2, didn't they?
ROBERTSON: They might have, yeah.
LEVINE: They might have. I don't know.
ROBERTSON: Um but, you know it was fully rigged, fully animated, but it, we just didn't have the, the time we needed to really, really polish it so w e ended up shipping with the, the Bouncer and, uh, Rosie.
KEIGHLEY: Hunting the Big Daddy, that demo was a-a huge moment I think in the game's kind of marketing campaign.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Clips from the Hunting the Big Daddy (2006) demo: player shoots a Rosie with the Pistol and the Shotgun in an early version of the Medical Pavilion; player holds a teddy bear with Telekinesis and lights it ablaze with a nearby gas cylinder and sets a Rosie on fire with it in an early version of Surgical Savings in the Medical Pavilion]
KEIGHLEY: Uh and that really I think, you know, sold the, the tension of that, that battle. When you showed that, did the entire game feel like that or was that really more of just like a vertical slice of what you wanted the game to feel like?
LEVINE: Huh, that at that point was more, what we wanted it to feel like because the Big Daddy was still, had a lot of problems at that point. Um, but we were confident we could do that, like we wanted to make sure we were, that was an experience we could deliver on. And it were, was like it functioned, but it would do really weird things like it had this tendency at the time to, if you did the wrong thing that it would turn into basically a super ball. And start, like a tiny little super ball.
KEIGHLEY: Uh-huh.
LEVINE: The Big Daddy would [whoosh], turn into a super ball and start bouncing or off, off the wa-, the ceiling and walls like a million miles an hour. We had, I don't, do you remember why it did that? Or what was going on?
ROBERTSON: I-I'm sure it was some physics bug. That we were, yeah.
KEIGHLEY: It's bad sort of...
LEVINE: And, and so that actually happened sometimes when we were doing the demo and Joe, uh, Faulstick who was the guy running the demo with me in Barcelona was very good at making sure that he turned away from the Big Daddy.
KEIGHLEY: Right.
LEVINE: "Like oh yeah, I guess we killed the Big Daddy, he must be dying over there."
KEIGHLEY: Exactly.
LEVINE: But, yeah so they-they, so all the things were functional but they were, they weren't really, they didn't have all their bells and whistles on yet. It was really good for us because it's, we, it sort of gave us some confidence that people would respond to just the notion of you know watching Little Sister and ch-, biding your time and choosing your moment.
ROBERTSON: Well, it gave us confidence, but it also gave us a tool that the development team as a whole could gather around and say, "We want to make it like this."
[SCENE OVERLAY: Clip from the Hunting the Big Daddy (2006) demo: player observes a Little Sister skipping with a Rosie lumbering behind in an early version of the Medical Pavilion; Final game: player reloads the Grenade Launcher and observes a Little Sister following a Rosie outside of Mercury Suites in Apollo Square; player observes a Bouncer climbing the stairs in Hephaestus]
ROBERTSON: Like yes the, a lot of elements in that demo were scripted, but they provided a framework for us to go back and how do we make that so it's not scripted, how do we make this robust enough so that the player can actually use these systems?
LEVINE: Yeah.
ROBERTSON: So it was something that we could point to and say you know, "Alright, how are we gonna do this, like let's break it down and let's, let's figure it out."
LEVINE: And that was like in September, and actually we, the game was done and, the game was done in February or March so we weren't that far off.
ROBERTSON: Yeah.
LEVINE: We were, a lot went into it, it, it, in those final months, um, but it was a big confidence boost for us because we thought it was the most important thing about the game besides the world, was this sort of Big Daddy, Little Sister concept and if people didn't care about it, it would've been a problem for us because we spent a lot of time on it.
[SCENE OVERLAY: Player attacks and kills a Bouncer with the Grenade Launcher in Upper Heat Loss Monitoring in Hephaestus]
==Behind the Scenes==
*The scripted Hunting the Big Daddy demo was described in further detail in a 2008 postmortem interview, with BioShock executive producer Alyssa Finley.
*The third Big Daddy was the Slow Pro, which would become the Rumbler in BioShock 2.
Category:Golden Film Reels