If you keep up with our blog and podcasts, you’ve heard about how we throw a lot of work away. Some pitches, like Monster Island, never make it past the documentation stage. Others, like newly-rediscovered RPG/RTS hybrid Dungeon Duel, get more than a handful of assets developed before being ultimately consigned to Irrational’s own dustbin of history.

Dungeon Duel was in development back in 2002, so it took some asking around to find Irrational staffers who still remembered working on it. As it turns out, technical director Chris Kline dug up a folder full of ancient email attachments showing game materials in various stages of completion. A lot of the folks listed in those decade-old CC lists still work here–art director Nate Wells, lead artist Shawn Robertson, concept artist Robb Waters, and creative director Ken Levine–not to mention Kline, of course.

As described in the pitch, “Dungeon Duel combines fast-paced RTS strategy with the addictiveness of card game trading in a unique fantasy setting–a true RTS game built specifically with consoles and their controllers in mind.” You can download the whole document as a PDF, including numerous pieces of artwork and mockups.

The concept art seen above was created by Robb Waters. Here are some more pieces we dug up while researching this forgotten bit of the studio’s past:

Sketched concept of what a built-out scene might look like.

Party and inventory sheet concept.

Fighter class concept and in-game model.

Environment concept created by Nate Wells.

In-game mockup based on Nate’s map concept.

We have to commend Chris Kline for somehow failing to lose track of these materials after nearly a decade. That’s why he makes the big bucks.

Does Irrational Games have a mission? Can there possibly be any methods to its well-documented madness? We’re ringing in the new year with an attempt to answer those questions, viewed through the lens of an employee who joined Irrational just four months ago. Discussions with studio members of all stripes–ranging from other relative newcomers all the way to co-founder Ken Levine–reveal that nothing is certain in the world of game development. And that’s just fine.

• Part 1: The Co-Founder – Ken Levine
• Part 2: Immigrants – Don Norbury, Jeff Seamster, Josh Davis, Murray Kraft
• Part 3: Gatekeepers – Bill Gardner, Shawn Robertson, Robert Tzong, Chris Kline
• Part 4: Natives – Alexx Kay, Nate Wells, Scott Sinclair, Shawn Robertson

Going forward, Irrational podcasts will continue to release once a month, but our plan is to alternate Irrational Behavior with Irrational Interviews. If you already subscribe to the individual podcast RSS feeds, please replace them with this new combined feed that incorporates both Behavior and Interviews.

Direct Download Episode 8

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Podcast music provided by:

• George Glass (Theme music)
• Spirit Kid (Part 1 intro)
• Permafav (Part 2 intro)
• Patrick Balthrop (Part 3 intro)
• Walking Sleep (Part 4 intro)
• The Monolators (Ending music)

We’re not talking about the orchestral scores, ambient loops and sound effects you hear during play (though those are important too), but rather the tunes we groove to as we work.  This is about what we listen to on the way into the office, or crank up after dark while the midnight oil burns.

Here are some of our favorite summer jams — the albums that keep us going during the dog days of July and August.

Amanda Cosmos – Senior Quality Assurance: Deadmau5 – For Lack of a Better Name

Joe Fielder – Producer: Explosions in the Sky – The Earth is not a Dead Cold Place

Grant Chang – Senior Animator: Neko Case – Middle Cyclone

Chris Kline – Technical Director: Stereolab – Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements

Ken Strickland – Combat Designer: The Gaslight Anthem – American Slang

Kristofel Munson – Programmer: Andrew W.K. – I Get Wet

Murray Kraft – Level Builder: Boards of Canada – Music Has the Right to Children

Matt Boehm – Animator: Rogue Wave – Permalight

Clint Bundrick – Combat Designer: Tool – Undertow

Collin Moore – Community Manager: Sleigh Bells – Treats

The Collected Ears of Irrational Games take in a wide variety of music.   Now we want to know:  what summer songs keep your iPod humming?

*These aren’t hard figures. Include them in your school papers at your own peril.

System Shock 2’s missing log

“One of the most controversial design decisions in Shock 2,” says designer Dorian Hart, “was to have the weapons degrade with use, and so be in regular need of repair. From a pure design standpoint, the goal was to ratchet up the feeling of constant tension. Part of what made Shock 2 such an emotional experience was that we never let the player get comfortable; having players know that their guns could jam in the middle of a fight played straight to that goal.

“There was, and continues to be, backlash from the fans about that system — and a majority of that criticism comes as complaints about the realism of the system.  In real life, weapons don’t noticeably degrade with each shot fired, and so it angered players that the Shock 2 weapons had that behavior.

“The maddening truth about that was, at least once during development, we talked about having an audio log in the game that talked about why that was happening — enough so that some people on the team thought we actually shipped with it. The log would have explained that as part of their takeover, the Many had released a special corrosive gas into the Von Braun that damaged weapons but was harmless to organic creatures.

“Of course, in hindsight, the team has been kicking themselves for not including that audio log. In one fell 30-second swoop, we could have prevented about 80 percent of the complaints, or at least redirected them toward Xerxes and the Many, and away from the development team.”

BioShock’s atmospheric pressure system

BioShock was slated to simulate deep-sea atmospheric pressure changes. In fact, the feature was functioning when the game shipped.

Technical Director Chris Kline explains: “Any area in BioShock could be associated with a ‘pressure region.’ Machines in each region allowed players to change the local pressure between low, normal, and high parameters. For each room in the game, there were entirely different light, fog, and HDR rendering setups, and when the pressure was changed, the whole atmosphere in the room would smoothly blend from the current setup to the new setup. In addition, every AI responded differently to pressure, meaning that, depending on the current pressure, the AI would have different animations, vocalizations, appearance, speeds, vulnerabilities to different damage types, and damage bonuses.

“The system was originally designed so that the player had an additional way to manipulate the world to his advantage ,” Kline adds. “For example, perhaps one AI was immune to fire in normal pressure but susceptible to it in high or low pressures; or an AI had poor perception in low pressure.”

“In practice, the system was a disaster because it caused several gameplay and production issues:

• The amount of work that artists needed to do in each room of the game tripled, because each pressure needed its own lighting and fog settings.
• It was impossible to control the mood of any given space, because changes in pressure resulted in changes in lighting and fog.
• Designers needed to plan for every permutation of pressure settings for every single room. QA then had to test these.

“Most importantly — and this is the issue that put the nail in the system’s coffin — was that we never found a good way to clearly convey the effect of pressure through audiovisual changes.”

Creating feedback to communicate the state of an environment, and the ways in which environmental changes affect characters, without resorting to clunky and/or abstract user-interface cues is one of game design’s central challenges. And when a state such as barometric pressure is invisible to those few senses that videogames stimulate — sight, sound, and to a tiny extent, touch — that task grows ever more time consuming. What does pressure look like? How does a Big Daddy behave under high pressure? Can players correctly interpret that behavior? How do they know that flames shoot farther under reduced pressure, or that bullets are more likely to blow things apart when pressure ratchets up?

Interestingly, some remnant of this system shipped with BioShock. “While  we ‘cut’ pressure from the game,” Kline says, “the portion that controlled lighting and fog changes was left in the code. At one point, I discovered (to my horror, because the code hadn’t been tested in ages) that artists were hijacking the pressure system to script lighting and fog changes — most notably in the Arcadia level when the trees die and are brought back to life. So I suppose that the code was solid.”

Biomechanical emphasis in BioShock

“Early on during BioShock’s development, we went through a phase that placed much more emphasis on biotechnology,” says designer Alexx Kay. “Audio logs, instead of being tape recorders, would be squishy, organic things, with lips and ears. Machines that seemed mechanical on the surface would actually have mutated humans operating them behind the scenes — something that players would only come to realize partway through the game. There is a small remnant of this notion in the hacking mini-game; originally, the fiction behind it was that you were increasing the flow of Adam to this addicted, mutated slave, and he was giving you extra benefits in gratitude.

BioShock’s insect-based ecology

According to designer Alexx Kay, “One of the original inspirations for BioShock was Ken Levine’s belief that it was getting too hard to create meaningful human interactions in games.  His first take on a solution: model meaningful insect interactions, like you would see on a nature show. BioShock would feature a complex ecology of creatures that interacted in simple, easy-to-get ways. Harvesters would gather resources and bring them back to Queens. Aggressors would attack the Harvesters, Protectors would guard them. (The Queens were large, immobile creatures, with lots of Adam, who could summon Protectors if attacked.) There would never be any speech, or any indication of higher intelligence.

“Ironically, we did a 180 from that, ending up with creatures that were very strongly human, if twisted, and who spoke all the time.

“Even the basic functionality of the ecology was mostly cut. We kept the fiction that Splicers would attack Little Sisters, and get into fights with Big Daddies — but except for a few scripted sequences, they actually wouldn’t.”

BioShock’s navigation robot

During the middle stages of Bioshock’s development, the team realized that due to the complex connectivity of Rapture, players needed assistance in order to navigate the city and complete quests. Technical Director Chris Kline says, “We wanted a map, but were concerned that this would take too much programming and design/art time to implement. So I came up with the idea of Nav-Bot: You could press a controller button to summon your Nav-Bot, activate him with another controller button, and then select from a list of destinations in a 2D user interface. You could then follow him to the designated location.

“There were a number of problems with this concept. The biggest one was that, while following Nav-Bot, the player would spend the entire time looking at the floor as Nav-Bot shuttled along (I pitched him as something akin to K-9 from Dr. Who). But there were other concerns:

• What if the player gets distracted while following Nav-Bot?

• What if Nav-Bot gets stuck in the middle of a brawl?

• How does Nav-Bot go up stairs? Elevators?

• If the player wants to remember a particular place and come back to it, how do players “mark” the location?

“Another hurdle to overcome was the fact that, unlike maps, Nav-Bot was not a familiar concept in first-person shooters. In the end, someone (maybe Jon Chey at Irrational Games Australia) made the executive decision that we needed to suck up the extra work and make a map. Thus died Nav-Bot.”

In any game development studio, you’ll find a bunch of inspired and imaginative people who have a lot to get off their chests. To save on counseling fees, we decided to sublimate these repressed feelings about their gaming lives by sticking a microphone in their faces and creating a series of podcasts that offer an insight into what makes us – and our games – tick.

Each podcast will explore a particular theme in what we hope is an entertaining and insightful way, and this theme will also evolve throughout the month on the Irrational Games website itself. Visit regularly and you’ll find content on the site that helps illustrate what we’re trying to describe in the podcast, or expands and explores the theme further.

Please contribute to the discussions about the podcasts in the forums and if you have a great idea for a future theme then let us know! We might even send you something to say thanks. But don’t hold us to it.

So to kick off, we chose a brutal theme – “ideas that died”. We explore what happens when creativity runs into technical restrictions, a lack of clear consensus, and – at times – its own convolution. You’ll glimpse abandoned BioShock tidbits, as well as an as yet unrevealed game from four years ago when Irrational Games backed away from a zombie invasion. And much, much more.

Oh, and you’ll understand why ‘dog in a wheelchair’ is the answer to just about any question…

Irrational Behavior podcasts act as tables of contents for stories that appear here on IrrationalGames.com each month. January’s content continues to explore dead ideas with the following features:

Discuss this episode of Irrational Behavior over in the forum.

iTunes Link

Direct Download Episode 1

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Podcast theme song, “Luna Park”, provided by Signal Hill from the album, “More After We’re Gone”.