We just dug up a particularly precious artifact:  a sketchbook from System Shock 2. We’re talking original artwork on honest-to-goodness paper – no Wacom tablets or Cintiq monitors, but  paper with the original coffee stains still intact.

We are pleased to share with you some of the contents of this archaeological find.  Enjoy the art in this installment of From the Vault, while we look for more treasures in long-abandoned boxes and dusty storage closets.

Apocalypse Shock?

“The original story had the player going to a spaceship to assassinate a character similar to Colonel Walter Kurtz from Apocalypse Now,” says Creative Director Ken Levine. “We pitched the game to Paul Neurath at Looking Glass Studios based on a story outline I wrote and they gave us access to the Dark Engine which was used to make Thief.”

“We took the concept around to all the major publishers of the day and we ended up talking to Electronic Arts, who held the rights to System Shock,” Levine adds.  EA eventually did sign the project and the original story outline quickly emerged. As Levine puts it, “you can’t have a System Shock game without SHODAN, so I wanted to rewrite everything.  I was such a System Shock fanboy that it was a dream come true to create the sequel.”

Zero-G vs. Technology

“Originally, the level that would become The Many had the player traverse from the Von Braun to The Rickenbacker on the outside of the hull,” says Levine. “We thought it would be a really cool mission because it would change everything the player was used to by introducing a zero gravity environment as well as changing the behavior of all the monsters.”  The technology in 1998, when System Shock 2 was in development, really didn’t allow for such grandiose ideas unless it was a major feature in the game.  Levine remembers chatting with Lead Programmer Robert Fermier to discuss the level and being told, “Dude that is going to be a huge amount of work for it to work properly.”  A feature specific to only a single mission of the game didn’t fit into the schedule. Levine adds, “It was good that it got cut. If you don’t have the resources for it, you can’t make it that good.”

F’ing with the Player

“To fuck with the audience was a new concept in video games,” says Levine on creating the plot twists in System Shock 2.  “It was a bit of an experiment and it had some resistance from the team, but once I had the idea I really wanted to run with it.”  With the help of Randy Smith, who was on loan from Looking Glass Studios, the script that Levine wrote was built into the sequence in DromED (the tool used to create levels in System Shock 2). Levine remembers, “That was a very challenging task and ended up being the most complex sequence in the game to script, with the multimedia presentation where the player finds out that Shodan has been posing as Polito the entire time.”

The End?  Rewrite.

“Due to miscommunications or differing ideas, a different cinematic video was created from the one that I originally scripted,” says Levine. “It had this elaborate sequence where Shodan would attempt to kill you in a double-cross, as this ‘cyber stinger’ that was in view provided tension of your impending doom.”  Upon getting his hands on the video for the ending sequence, Levine didn’t see anything that he wrote in the script.  “We didn’t have much to work with.  It was like when you look in the cupboard and you’re trying to make soup, and you have a bag of salt and couple of pinto beans.”  Working with fixed assets can be extremely challenging especially with limited time and resources as well as fighting the technology back then.  Levine remembers, “We had to write to the assets we had at that point, and all we could do was edit it.  We completely ran out of time and that cut scene wasn’t the right ending for the game.”

900 Square Feet of Amateurs

“System Shock 2 was made in single room, which was around 900 square feet,” Levine recalls of the original office space that Irrational Games called home.  “We didn’t have any money and didn’t have a lot of experience shipping games at that point.  We lucked out by hiring some newcomers like Nate Wells, Ian Vogel, Michael Swiderek, and Mauricio Tejerina, as well as being loaned some guys from Looking Glass, including Dorian Hart, Alexx Kay, and Randy Smith.” Working in such conditions on a project that lasted 11 months lead to many sleepless nights and likely some foul body odor.  “If we knew then what we know now, we probably would have just stopped in our tracks petrified, and not have been successful because we wouldn’t have thought we could pull it off,” remembers Levine.  While conditions were cramped, there was a great deal of optimism while working on System Shock 2. “I remember getting that first milestone check for around $75,000 from Looking Glass and thinking, ‘OH MY GOD! WE CAN DO ANYTHING!’ We made it happen.”

*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.”