Hello everyone. It’s been a few months since our first dev diary. We balance our time between working on the game and sharing our progress. Today we wanted to give you a look at the original process with some of the key members of the development team who shaped the game.
Creating the “Judas Simulator”
People often think that our games start with a story, but we almost always start with a core design element. In BioShock, it was the Big Daddy and Little Sister bond. In Infinite, it was a companion character, Elizabeth. In Judas it is a animated narrative. We asked ourselves: “How can we tell a fully realized story where the characters can react in real time to even the smallest choices the player makes?” It took many years to figure out how to do this at a systems level. Eventually the pieces formed around our main character, Judas.
“The project began with the desire to tell stories that were less linear, responsive to the player, and unfolded in a way that no one had ever seen in any of Ken’s games. This told us a lot in advance about what we needed: namely, characters with sturdy, competing goals, each of whom would have a stake in everything the player does. Starting with this framework, we spent a lot of time thinking about these characters, their conflicts, the right setting to bring them all together, and the systems that underpin it all. For a long time. this time there wasn’t even an established hero – just a sort of cipher, a blank slate.
Eventually the story and world started to come together into something concrete and we had to figure out who the player character should be. Typically, you want to place your characters in the last place they would want to be. So what kind of person would really have difficulty dealing with all these relationships and conflicting interests? And I remember that was the moment Ken delivered the monologue that started it all.
– Drew Mitchell, Lead Narrative Designer
“I often come up with ideas when I’m running, and one day I thought of a speech that would define this character we were trying to come up with. This speech came to me while I was struggling through the third mile.
I only eat at vending machines because I don’t like interacting with waiters. Restaurants are more complicated: there are greetings and “hello” and “Is everything OK at this table?” And I think to myself, “Why should I care what you recommend? You’re not me!” But I’m not supposed to say it, so I just have to count down the seconds until the interaction ends and come up with socially acceptable ways to say, “Fuck you.” Because for me, a conversation is a prelude to failure. Machines never ask me a question I don’t know the answer to. Exchange comes down to a transaction: money in, product out. Why can’t people be more like this?”
– Ken Levine, studio president and original director
Caption: Judas concept art
This stream of consciousness became the touchstone we returned to for this character and, ultimately, the game as a whole. “Judas,” as she has come to be called, understands machines in a way that humans will never be able to. This became her greatest strength… and greatest weakness. We placed her in a science fiction world, on a colony ship filled with robots – a futuristic setting that would make someone like her incredibly powerful. But it’s also a world where personal success depends on how well you can conform to the rules, because defiance would lead to mission failure. This makes her an outlaw, a pariah – a Judas. This tension at the heart of this character influenced everything in the game that we stopped thinking of as an FPS and started calling “Judas Simulator.” It all comes down to this basic idea of interacting with the world as Judas.
“I think the biggest difference between Judas and BioShock or BioShock Infinite is in the name. The game was named after her. Booker and Jack were strangers in a strange land, just like the player. Judas comes from the Mayflower. In fact, she is at the center of the events that set the story in motion. She has a history with this world and the people in it – most of it very, very bad. Her story is much more than just escaping a sinking ship and gives many opportunities for the player to determine how their journey will unfold.
There’s always the risk of giving the player a really specific, really vocal character to control. You’re always worried about creating dissonance between them. So it was great to see testers stop and ask themselves, “What would Judas do here? How would she react?” You can see that they talk to the heroine and take her and the entire journey seriously.”
– Drew Mitchell, Lead Narrative Designer
May Flower
We want to convey this world as best we can, not only through story, but also visually. A unique challenge in creating the setting for our colony ship is that it is a much older space that can be created for player exploration. Rapture and Columbia have been around since the beginning. However, the Mayflower voyage has been going on for decades and has changed enormously since it set sail.
“At the beginning of its journey it was a more practical, conventional, modular spaceship. However, during its mission, due to conflict between human factions and ideals, it changed into what you see now. We are working to convey this through the environment. As with any city with a significant history, if you start digging up the streets, you will find layers of the city’s past. Older eras of streets have long been buried, forgotten and overbuilt by the roads you now walk on. With the Mayflower as a spaceship, we want to make it generational the world has the same sense of time, history and credibility; it is a civilization that has gone through eras of conflict and rebirth, and the characters and architecture of the world reflect these layers of the onion, which is a powerful visual storytelling mechanism.
Thanks to this, players can take on the role of a historian and architect while exploring the Mayflower. As you discover more, you’ll make increasingly informed decisions based on the story and characters on your journey.”
– Nathan Phail-Liff, studio art director
Another factor in creating this setting is that the world itself is animated, not just the story and characters. As with animated storytelling, we had to train the system on what makes for a good environment, using sophisticated tags and rule sets to populate the world with believable design elements.
“Basically, we identify puzzle pieces and content packs from which we want to create a Mayflower setting. One example is the living quarters. We don’t have just one type of space – we have different categories: VIP pilgrim quarters, regular pilgrim dormitories, all the way to rapist quarters. The art team creates set pieces and materials for each of these quarters, and the design team analyzes in detail how all of these elements can fit together in different layouts that feel grounded to the main theme and supporting gameplay During Assembling the game’s puzzles, the system must understand the different sets of puzzles and the hierarchy of content in order to put them together in a meaningful way that supports storytelling. More upscale and fancier places may have high ceilings, huge windows and large lobbies, but Violator’s space is in the lower, dirty underbelly of the ship and to get to them you have to use what we call the “stairway to hell.” separating these spaces both visually and physically.”
– Karen Segars, featured artist
In our previous games we did all this manually, but it doesn’t allow us to achieve the dynamics we’re aiming for. So we took on the challenge of teaching the system how to tell stories and the interior decorator, creating a set of rules we trust to populate the world in a believable, compelling way that allows for reactivity in a way you’ve never seen in our previous games.
Could you kindly?
We’d love to hear what you’d like to read more about in future dev diaries. So please let us know on our social media or via email what interests you most about Judas and how we create it.
