Ex-BioShock Infinite developer explains the viral baguette boy

As a repository for all of our waking thoughts and unrestrained id, it’s hard to beat Twitter. Of course, this can be bad; not knowing other people’s idle thoughts is often a good thing! On occasion though, it’s kind of neat — like when someone wakes up on an otherwise normal day and thinks: “Hey, remember how BioShock infinite had some kid dancing with a baguette in the background for no discernible reason?” And then someone And Other says “I sure do because That was me!.”

Twitter user @instant_grat thought about the possibility of a brief moment during this weekend BioShock infinite’s Burial at Sea DLC, the only place in the video game where a boy can be seen frolicking around a pillar with a baguette held over his head — as if all Parisian boys want in the world is a loaf to call their own, to lord over all the loafless street urchins on the promenade.

It’s a very funny observation, but what’s even better is that Gwen Frey, the developer behind indie game Kine A former member of BioShock infinite It was a team member who noticed the incident and could tell the tale of the lad.

Frey said that populating is a major part of Frey’s job. BioShock infinite with background characters, many of which include something she calls “chumps.” In her words, chumps are “skeletal meshes of humans with no AI.” Think of them as animatronics you’d run into at a theme park.

In order to liven up the Paris scene in question, Frey wanted to put a moving background character in the space but it was too resource intensive to script AI pathing necessary to guide a character around the space — so an ad hoc solution was stitched together from other assets taken from throughout the game. To add more dancing kids to the scene, Frey created a looping animation that would allow for two children to dance. However, having two people dancing together was too much work. wrong. But if Frey could put a baguette in said kid’s hands…that might work!

Frey’s tweets detail a classic problem of game development — the need to make the most of limited resources in order to improve the gameplay experience as much as possible, and make a game world feel just a little more alive. You also have the raw material to make funny social media posts almost a decade after.