The first-person shooter video game and third installment of the franchise, Bioshock Infinite, introduced us to bread boya boy who appears in the DLC episodes Burial at Seaand that in a pleasant sequence he wandered happily lifting a large piece of baguette bread, became one of the curious facts of the game at the time and recently, the subject of a viral tweet that made fun of him a bit, saying that it was a clumsy way of telling players, you’re in Paris, and constantly reminding us.
But despite what some users think, that is not the reason why it exists bread boynor why is he dancing or why is he holding the loaf of bread, and recently Kotaku contacted Gwen Freyfounder of the independent studio Chump Squad and creator of bread boyto talk more about bread boy and learn the story behind this curious NPC.
Gwen Freyin 2011 I worked at Irrational Gamesas a cheerleader in BioShock Infinite and its downloadable content, she mentions that the scene of the bread boy from Burial at Seatakes place in a fantasy Paris, where everything is too perfect and as part of that dream, when the player returns to Rapturethe underwater city where most of the Burial at SeaOne of the many tasks of frey was to put characters in the background in this scene: the painters capturing the Seine, the woman chatting in the street and the couples having an aperitif, among other examples.
“I thought it looked really good. But I thought it was pretty static.” “I talked to some level builders and they agreed, as if there wasn’t enough movement in the scene”mentioned frey.
And so, they thought of giving it movement, and for this, they chose an NPC, to bless him with the powers of wandering, but none of them seemed to have much to offer walking around…
“A fool is just […] like a skeletal mesh that just plays a looping animation,” said freyand that chumpwas the nickname that the developers of Irrational Games they gave this particular type of NPC, but they appear functionally in any such game, they are characters that have no virtual brain and no pathfinding, in contrast to AI characters that have specific programmed behaviors.
The “Fools” in this scene of Burial at Seahave head and eye tracking scripts you created frey. This allows NPCs to react to the presence of Elizabeth (so they can say “Bonjour!”). But that’s it.
“Basically, as soon as I got there, we found out that we could have a lot less AI on screen than we thought, when we looked at the specs of the consoles.”said frey. Due to the computational weight of the AI characters, the team could only have seven on screen at a time, eight if you count Elizabethwho in BioShock Infinite he is an NPC and the player’s constant companion.
So, it was just a lonely town, with only seven characters visible at a time, so frey worked on a system to implement chumps: animated, but mostly stationary NPCs. They can be made to move, but their movements are programmed rather than AI-driven. The game could support many fools on the screen at the same time, because they are very computationally light.
But this one, he would be a fool to solve the movement problems in the Parisian scene, but frey, inadvertently while setting up Bread Boy, unknowingly released a meme. If he bread boy it’s pretty silly, but it’s a reminder that every part of a game has a developer’s fingerprint, and the weirdest details can point to an interesting story, this guy became a meme that exists due to a combination of technical limitations , the need to create a more dynamic scene and a creative solution to the problem.