Case Study: Bioshock Museum of Orphaned Concepts Tour (Unfinished)

Case History/Background (Looking at some of the designs shown in the museum)

• Museum-style level exclusive to the BioShock Ultiimate Rapture Edition and remastered version of BioShock: The Collection
• Contains early/heavily reworked artwork and ideas that were removed from the final verson of BioShock
• Forest Concept Art: An attempt to design how oxygen could be provided to an underwater city. Image shows an observation platform from which the forest could be viewed.

• The Gatherer: It's job was to reclaim ADAM from corpses around Rapture. Earliest iteration behind the idea of the little sisters, seen below. Gatherer generated no sympathy from players however -  further concepts including animals were worked over until the sketch of a deformed child inspired the eureka moment behind the little sisters.

• Slo-Pro-Fum: Prototype Big Daddy, became a fully funcional AI but was cut so the team could focus on other Big Daddy types.

Early Bouncer: Original part of the Bouncer type of Big Daddy featured a flat headed drill at the end of each arrm. Big Daddies were envisioned as the builders of rapture, their weapons modified from tools they would have used in construction. When the Gatherers were re-imagined as the Little Sisters, the drills were changed for a gloved hand so the two characters could interact.

• "Stitchy": Was a fully functioning model used in early demo's untill the team decided it was a terrible design and scrapped it.

Early Splicer Concept Art: Shows process of moving from grotesque to human. Team had trouble conveying how someone who had spliced to become a marksman would look.

"Pre-Yam Hand": Before solidifying the fiction around Adam, Irrational experimented with the idea of it being an external, injected substance. "Here you can see us playing around with Adam being mechanically injected," said lead Artist Shawn Robertson, "so this Splicer's got vials of it on his belt." This model was created but never made it into the game in any form.

Questions?

Wondering what makes the final design of a character better than the initial design? Look at gatherer vs little sister as a case study example.

Analysis

Conclusions

1. More interesting and varied colour palette on little sister
2. Blue and red give little sister points of interest whereas the gatherer has none of these being a combination of similar tones of brown
3. More recognizable silhouette on little sister, more complex and identifiable whereas the gatherer looks like an uninteresting blob
4. Gatherer has no identifiable features. - Arms/legs/teeth/eyes/features, nothing identifiable is visible making the silhouette weak and uninteresting.
5. No aspect of the gatherer design expresses emotion - shape/size features making it had to reate to or be afraid of or empathize with. For something that is supposed to be horrifying there are no features that impart on the viewer a sense of foreboding or fear.