The true story behind BioShock Infinite’s Bread Boy

The true story behind BioShock Infinite’s Bread Boy

Bioshock Infinite has an iconic and notable NPC: the Bread Boy.
The bread boy appears in Bioshock Infiniteit is Burial at sea DLC episodes, in an oversized Parisian dream sequence. He was the subject of a recent viral tweet who kinda poked fun at what the tweeter considered a clumsy way of telling players, Hey! You are in Paris !
But the reasons the Bread Boy exists, Why he dances, Why he holds the wand – tell a larger story about how games are made and the very specific and very strange challenges that developers face.
That’s why I reached out to Gwen Frey, founder of indie studio Chump Squad and creator of Bread Boy, to find out more.
Frey is currently hard at work on a puzzle game called lab rat for Chump Squad. But in 2011, she was at Irrational Games, working as a host on Bioshock Infinite and its downloadable content.
The Bread Boy scene from Burial at sea takes place in a fantasy Paris, where everything is a little too perfect. Of course, once this dream is gone, the player will be back in Rapture, the underwater city where most of the Burial at sea takes place. One of Frey’s many tasks was to place figures in the background in this scene: the painters capturing the Seine, the woman chatting in the street, and the couples having an aperitif, for example.
“I thought it looked really good. But I thought it was pretty static,” Frey said. “I talked to level builders, and they agreed, like there’s no just wasn’t enough movement in the scene.”
But bringing movement to the scene wasn’t as simple as picking an NPC and blessing them with the powers of walking. Those NPCs… were idiots.
“A fool is just […] like a skeletal mesh that just plays a looping animation,” Frey said. Chump is the nickname that the developers at Irrational Games have given to this particular type of NPC, but they functionally appear in any game of this type. These are characters that have no virtual brains or orientation, unlike AI characters that have specific programmed behaviors.
The idiots in this scene from Burial at sea have head and eye tracking scripts created by Frey. This allows NPCs to react to Elizabeth’s presence (so they can say “Hello!”). But that’s about all.
Chumps were developed early in Frey’s tenure at Irrational Games.
“Basically, as soon as I got there, we discovered that we could have a lot less on-screen AI than we thought when we looked at console specs,” Frey said. Due to the computational weight of the AI ​​characters, the team could only have seven on screen at a time – eight if you count Elizabeth, who Bioshock Infinite is an NPC and the player’s constant companion.
But it’s a lonely city in the sky that only has seven figures visible at a time. Frey therefore worked on a system to implement chumps: animated, but mostly stationary NPCs. They can be made to move, but their movements are scripted rather than AI-driven. The game could support many on-screen chumps at the same time because they are so computationally light.
And it would be an idiot who would solve the movement problems of the Parisian scene. Watch the video for a detailed breakdown of how Frey prepared the Bread Boy and unwittingly started a meme.
People seem to enjoy watching the Bread Boy – even though he makes them laugh. Now Frey is hard at work on an intentionally funny game: lab rata satirical puzzle game planned this year by his studio, Chump Squad.
lab rat grew out of Frey’s feelings of absurdity at the start of the pandemic of being trapped indoors, doing silly little tasks on a computer.
“I felt like this rat in a cage, just doing chores,” Frey said. “I was looking at the way technology was treating us and I felt like – I don’t mean to say anything bad.” An evil AI, like GLaDOS for example, would be actively cruel to humanity. What Frey felt was something more distant and indifferent.
“Technology isn’t mean to us – technology is pretending,” Frey said. “It’s inauthentic. It’s pretending to be there for us. But it profiles us. And he judges us. And it makes assumptions.
At the same time, Gwen felt that it had been a long time since there had been “a really funny good puzzle game”. The result is lab ratwhich is due out later this year.

“The most important thing for me is always that games have the ability to reach people,” Frey said. “And if I could make someone laugh with that, you know…that’s it.” It’s the best feeling.
The Bread Boy is pretty silly, but it’s a reminder that every part of a game bears a developer’s fingerprint, and the weirdest details can point to an interesting story. This iconic and indelible meme boy exists due to a combination of technical limitations, the need to create a more dynamic scene, and a creative solution to the problem.
Everything is done in about the time it takes to bake a baguette!

#true #story #BioShock #Infinites #Bread #Boy

The true story behind BioShock Infinite’s Bread Boy

Bioshock Infinite has an iconic and notable NPC: the Bread Boy.
The bread boy appears in Bioshock Infiniteit is Burial at sea DLC episodes, in an oversized Parisian dream sequence. He was the subject of a recent viral tweet who kinda poked fun at what the tweeter considered a clumsy way of telling players, Hey! You are in Paris !
But the reasons the Bread Boy exists, Why he dances, Why he holds the wand – tell a larger story about how games are made and the very specific and very strange challenges that developers face.
That’s why I reached out to Gwen Frey, founder of indie studio Chump Squad and creator of Bread Boy, to find out more.
Frey is currently hard at work on a puzzle game called lab rat for Chump Squad. But in 2011, she was at Irrational Games, working as a host on Bioshock Infinite and its downloadable content.
The Bread Boy scene from Burial at sea takes place in a fantasy Paris, where everything is a little too perfect. Of course, once this dream is gone, the player will be back in Rapture, the underwater city where most of the Burial at sea takes place. One of Frey’s many tasks was to place figures in the background in this scene: the painters capturing the Seine, the woman chatting in the street, and the couples having an aperitif, for example.
“I thought it looked really good. But I thought it was pretty static,” Frey said. “I talked to level builders, and they agreed, like there’s no just wasn’t enough movement in the scene.”
But bringing movement to the scene wasn’t as simple as picking an NPC and blessing them with the powers of walking. Those NPCs… were idiots.
“A fool is just […] like a skeletal mesh that just plays a looping animation,” Frey said. Chump is the nickname that the developers at Irrational Games have given to this particular type of NPC, but they functionally appear in any game of this type. These are characters that have no virtual brains or orientation, unlike AI characters that have specific programmed behaviors.
The idiots in this scene from Burial at sea have head and eye tracking scripts created by Frey. This allows NPCs to react to Elizabeth’s presence (so they can say “Hello!”). But that’s about all.
Chumps were developed early in Frey’s tenure at Irrational Games.
“Basically, as soon as I got there, we discovered that we could have a lot less on-screen AI than we thought when we looked at console specs,” Frey said. Due to the computational weight of the AI ​​characters, the team could only have seven on screen at a time – eight if you count Elizabeth, who Bioshock Infinite is an NPC and the player’s constant companion.
But it’s a lonely city in the sky that only has seven figures visible at a time. Frey therefore worked on a system to implement chumps: animated, but mostly stationary NPCs. They can be made to move, but their movements are scripted rather than AI-driven. The game could support many on-screen chumps at the same time because they are so computationally light.
And it would be an idiot who would solve the movement problems of the Parisian scene. Watch the video for a detailed breakdown of how Frey prepared the Bread Boy and unwittingly started a meme.
People seem to enjoy watching the Bread Boy – even though he makes them laugh. Now Frey is hard at work on an intentionally funny game: lab rata satirical puzzle game planned this year by his studio, Chump Squad.
lab rat grew out of Frey’s feelings of absurdity at the start of the pandemic of being trapped indoors, doing silly little tasks on a computer.
“I felt like this rat in a cage, just doing chores,” Frey said. “I was looking at the way technology was treating us and I felt like – I don’t mean to say anything bad.” An evil AI, like GLaDOS for example, would be actively cruel to humanity. What Frey felt was something more distant and indifferent.
“Technology isn’t mean to us – technology is pretending,” Frey said. “It’s inauthentic. It’s pretending to be there for us. But it profiles us. And he judges us. And it makes assumptions.
At the same time, Gwen felt that it had been a long time since there had been “a really funny good puzzle game”. The result is lab ratwhich is due out later this year.

“The most important thing for me is always that games have the ability to reach people,” Frey said. “And if I could make someone laugh with that, you know…that’s it.” It’s the best feeling.
The Bread Boy is pretty silly, but it’s a reminder that every part of a game bears a developer’s fingerprint, and the weirdest details can point to an interesting story. This iconic and indelible meme boy exists due to a combination of technical limitations, the need to create a more dynamic scene, and a creative solution to the problem.
Everything is done in about the time it takes to bake a baguette!

#true #story #BioShock #Infinites #Bread #Boy