Overview was the creative director and lead writer for
BioShock Infinite. Levine had previously worked in the same roles for
BioShock. Developer
Irrational Games (then 2K Boston) and publisher
2K Games released
BioShock in 2007 to critical and commercial acclaim. In late 2007, 2K Games approached Irrational about a sequel. Exhausted from shipping
BioShock and wary of repeating themselves by returning to the same property, staff and studio head and creative director
Ken Levine were uninterested in immediately returning to another
BioShock game. Instead, Irrational and 2K struck an agreement that saw select personnel from Irrational form a new studio,
2K Marin, to start work on a sequel. Levine and Irrational would instead join development of a game in the
XCOM franchise. While the setting of a floating city would remain consistent, the time period, characters, and the story itself remained undefined as the team churned through different ideas. Designers and artists would sometimes spend months developing ideas that would be scuttled within minutes after priorities shifted or Levine changed his mind. At the same time as the story mode was undergoing constant revisions, a set of multiplayer modes was also being designed. The first mode, Border Control, was a
tower defense game intended to be set within the game's world. The other multiplayer offering, code-named Spec-Ops, would have been a cooperative mode with up to four players. Matches would take place on maps that would evolve after release, using environmental storytelling to depict Columbia's evolving civil war. Chey's departure meant Levine had to shoulder more production-focused work in opposition to his creative focus, and the staff buildup in Levine's estimation "shattered" the company culture in the process. "Managing 30 or 40 people where you know everybody's name is a very different process than managing 150 people. You walk by people in the studio and you don't know who they are," he recalled. Irrational worked in secrecy on
Infinite for two-and-a-half years prior to its announcement, teasing the game with the moniker "Project Icarus". The game was announced at a press event on August 12, 2010, in New York City, where journalists were shown a teaser trailer and Levine outlined the basic story of the game; these were followed by several demos and showcases of the game at events in 2011. The game was still undergoing a troubled development. While the big picture elements of the story were now locked, Levine continued to make changes to large parts of the game at a whim. Despite the expanding cost of development and additional staff, the game was not getting closer to completion. After the game was
released to manufacturing, more than a dozen staff voluntarily left Irrational, with the number accelerating as the game's post-launch content began development. and involved a team of around 200 from Irrational in addition to support from outside studios.
Infinite's setting was inspired by turn-of-the-century American culture and
propaganda, with some of the artwork around Columbia adapted from historical posters. By selecting the hypothetical date of July 4, 1912, the team identified films to draw imagery from, like
The Music Man,
Meet Me in St. Louis, and
Hello, Dolly, which exhibited ideal views of Americana at the turn of the 20th century. Other sources of inspiration for the game's art included photographs from before and after the
1906 San Francisco earthquake, and from
Sears-Roebuck catalogs. Irrational designed the vertical and open-air spaces of Columbia to provide more opportunities to include various types of combat compared to the tight quarters of Rapture. 2K Marin assisted in building out the architecture and details of Columbia, given the much larger scope of the levels than previous
BioShock games. The game also incorporated influences from more recent events at the time such as the
Occupy movement in 2011, which inspired how the Vox Populi group would grow from its haphazard beginnings. Central to the game is the relationship between the player character, Booker, and the AI companion, Elizabeth. Unlike
BioShocks
Jack who only talks during the opening sequence and
BioShock 2s
Subject Delta, who is a
silent protagonists,
BioShock Infinites protagonist, Booker, was given his own voice and fully fleshed-out identity. Elizabeth, a crucial element of the game, was designed as a character which could not only be a useful AI companion to the player but a real partner with a significant emotional bond as well. The voice actors for Booker and Elizabeth—
Troy Baker and
Courtnee Draper, respectively—helped refine the story and their characters. Levine did not provide the actors with full knowledge of the story in order to help them develop their characters' relationship in a more natural manner. In the early development of
Infinite, Elizabeth was designed to be more of a useful tool than a partner; she would perform tasks like picking locks that the player could not, but otherwise was not a major part of the experience. After Irrational saw players react favorably to Elizabeth in the E3 2011 demo, they expanded her role and abilities to make her a bigger part of the game. and Trip from
Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. Irrational wanted to avoid giving Elizabeth any of the same tools that the player had, such as a gun. Her design and costume was designed so players could recognize her from a distance given the open-space nature of the game and limited resolution, with the color scheme inspired by that of superheroes. The time period's setting inspired the incorporation of quantum theory by
Albert Einstein,
Max Planck, and
Werner Heisenberg that would lead to the
Many Worlds Theory. Irrational consulted with physicist Mackenzie Van Camp to ground the game's science fiction in real
quantum mechanics. Levine promised that the ending of
Infinite was "like nothing you've experienced in a video game before", and wanted to avoid the issue
BioShock had where the story lost its momentum in its final third.
Technology and gameplay Realizing Columbia, with its indoor and outdoor settings that take place thousands of feet above the ground, was a technical challenge for Irrational. The modified
Unreal Engine 2.5 used for
BioShock was inadequate for their vision. Instead, they used Unreal Engine 3, modifying it with their own lighting engine and means to simulate the movement and buoyancy of the buildings. The development team found that the implementation of open spaces created new gameplay options for the player, such as deciding between long-ranged attacks or finding a means to move in for short-range or melee combat. Nostrums would have made permanent changes to the character and could not be removed once used. In early builds of the game, as many as 16 enemies could be on-screen at once, but this was dialed back to just six, a constraint which impacted the game design. Now, each individual enemy had to be tougher, creating "bullet sponge" enemies. The developers used the AI routines of the roving Big Daddy and Little Sister characters from
BioShock as a starting point for improving Elizabeth, giving her the tendency to look and move around like a real person instead of a robotic non-player character that either fought the player or did nothing. The game also monitors the player's actions to try and keep Elizabeth out of the line of fire. Cutting Elizabeth from the game was considered during development because of the difficulty in programming her, but Levine insisted she remain. The score was partly inspired by
Jonny Greenwood's score for
There Will Be Blood and
Paul Buckmaster's score for
12 Monkeys. Schyman worked on the score over an extended period of time due to the game's long development cycle. Schyman did not limit himself to the
music of the period, The first game was set in 1960, and it was easy to acquire musical pieces representative of the era. ==Themes==