BioShock Infinite’s Bread Boy: the whole (grain) story

BioShock InfiniteThe Bread Boy is an iconic NPC and a unique standout.

The Bread Boy appeared in BioShock infinite’s Burial at SeaDLC episodes in a Parisian dream sequence. His story was featured in a recent viral tweetThe tweeter thought it was a funny way of telling players. hey! You’re in Paris!

The Bread Boy’s existence is not accidental. Why? he dances, Why he holds the baguette — tell a broader story about how games are made, and the very specific, very strange challenges that developers face.

That’s why I reached out to Gwen Frey, founder of indie studio Chump Squad and maker of the Bread Boy, to get the inside story.

Frey is busy working on a puzzle called Lab RatChump Squad. She was an animator at Irrational games in 2011. BioShock infiniteAccess the downloadable content.

Bread Boy Scene of Burial at SeaIt takes place in Paris fantasy, where all is just right. Once this fantasy is over, however, the player will return to Rapture, an underwater city that most people live in. Burial at Sea takes place. One of Frey’s many tasks was placing background characters in this scene: the painters capturing the Seine, the woman chatting on the street, and the couples enjoying aperitifs, for example.

“I thought it looked really good. But I thought it was pretty static,” Frey said. “I talked to some level builders, and they agreed, like there just wasn’t enough motion in the scene.”

But giving the scene motion wasn’t as easy as picking an NPC and blessing it with the powers of ambulation. These NPCs…were chumps.

“A chump is just […] like a skeletal mesh that just plays a looping animation,” said Frey. This NPC is called Chump by Irrational Games, although they can be found in any functional game. They’re characters that have no virtual brain or pathfinding, in contrast to AI characters that have specific programmed behaviors.

These are the scenes of the “chumps” Burial at SeaFrey created scripts to track the eyes and head. This allows the NPCs to react to Elizabeth’s presence (so that they can say “Bonjour!”). But that’s about it.

Chumps were developed early in Frey’s tenure at Irrational Games.

“Basically, as soon as I got there, we discovered that we could have far fewer AI on screen than we believed, when we looked at the specs for the consoles,” Frey said. Because of the computational weight of the AI characters, the team could only have seven on-screen at a time — eight if you count Elizabeth, who in BioShock infinite is an NPC, and the player’s constant companion.

But it’s a lonely city on the sky that only has seven characters visible at a time. Frey developed a system for implementing chumps. NPCs were animatable, but mostly still stationary. Although they can be programmed to move, their movements cannot be controlled by AI. The game could support plenty of chumps on-screen at one time, because they’re so computationally light.

It would have to be Frey, who solved Paris’ movement issues. The video explains how Frey created the Bread Boy and launched unwittingly a meme.

People seem to enjoy looking at the Bread Boy — even if he’s making them laugh. Now, Frey is hard at work on a game that’s intentionally funny: Lab RatChump Squad is releasing a funny puzzle game this year called “The Chump Squad”.

Lab Rat was born from Frey’s early-pandemic feelings of absurdity at being trapped indoors, doing silly little tasks on a computer.

“I felt like this rat in a cage, just performing tasks,” Frey said. “I was looking at the way technology was treating us and it felt — I don’t want to say evil.” An evil AI, like GLaDOS for example, would be actively cruel to humanity. Frey saw something deeper and more distant.

“Technology isn’t mean to us — technology is pretending,” Frey said. “It’s inauthentic. It’s pretending to be there for us. But it’s profiling us. And it’s judging us. And it’s making assumptions.”

At the same time, Gwen felt it had been a long time since there had been “a really funny, good puzzle game.” The result is Lab RatThis year, the release date for the upcoming book is later in this year.

“The biggest thing for me is just always, games have the capacity to reach people,” Frey said. “And if I could make somebody laugh with this, you know … that’s it. That’s the best feeling.”

The Bread Boy is pretty silly, but he’s a reminder that every part of a game has a developer’s fingerprint on it, and the weirdest details can point to an interesting story. The technical limitations that led to this iconic meme-boy are combined with the desire to make the scene more exciting and creative solutions to the problem.

It takes about half the time to prepare a baguette.