8 Aug, 2011
If you ever thought creating the perfect end product on your first try is the key to absolute success, then you’d be dead wrong. After all, practice makes perfect, and if you don’t make mistakes, then you don’t have anything to learn from. Irrational Games knows this all too well, and the big man himself Ken Levine even said that some of Irrational’s best work came out of absolute horrid failure.
“We basically develop our games by failing,” said Levine in an interview with GamaSutra. “We just throw things away all the time.”
Ever had a stroke of genius, tried to put it on paper, and ended up crushing it into a ball and tossing it into the nearest trash can? Yeah, we all get that. It’s all trial and error, and it’s all part of the painful process. “We try things, and are incredibly open to failing, and learning from that, and moving on,” said Levine. “Everybody has to get comfortable with throwing their stuff away.”
Becoming too attached to a concept will lead to disaster. In a creative process where things evolve rapidly, or ideas fall in and out of favor at the drop of a hat, things have to be easily let go. That’s easier said than done, as most artists pour their heart and souls into a creation and are not willing to let it go, especially if it’s towards the cutting room floor. Afterall, would you want to spend days (or weeks) on something, just to watch it be let go? Probably not. “Some people take a little more time to get used to that,” said Lead Artist Shawn Robertson.
“…you have to get comfortable working with the ground shifting underneath your feet a lot,” said Levine. “At the end of the day, it’s about, ‘Is this going to be awesome?’”
Perhaps this is the secret to upcoming BioShock Infinite‘s success. So far, everything that has been presented to us has given a picture of clashing and dueling factions, but it all works so well. There had to be conflicts along the way – someone had to have said, “My idea is better!” We have at least one of those in every single company (and you know who you are), but fostering such a willingness to part with a carefully crafted idea is a serious achievement in itself. It’s no surprise to learn then, that Infinite has been Irrational’s biggest undertaking to date.
“For a long time, it looked like ‘Bioshock 1 in the sky,’” said Levine. It was far too similar to Andrew Ryan’s underwater capital Rapture, thus a severe face lift had to be done. “That’s when we came to the conclusion that we had to do some aggressive change to make it a distinct look,” explained Art Director Nate Wells.
“All of a sudden, the phrase, ‘July 4, 1912′ came into our head,” said Levine. The idealized notion of a perfect summer day popped into everyone’s heads. “…all of a sudden, literally the clouds parted.” Much like New Year’s Eve in 1959 became the focal point of Rapture, Independence Day of 1912 became the setting for Infinite.
“Ken started literally pushing back the clouds — ‘bluer, bluer!’” said Robertson. “We were really uncomfortable with it, our initial reaction is it’s a little bit cartoonish…but when we saw it in context, that was our a-ha moment.”
“That searching and that failure was absolutely essential,” said Wells. “By spending some time muddling around…by failing, you find it. That was an idea that I don’t think that we could have landed on; we wandered to it. You need that galvanizing idea, but you can’t…just do nothing until you have it.”
The wandering was well worth it in Infinite‘s case. After the showing of BioShock 2, some fans were rather disappointed with what they were given, especially after the tour de force present in Rapture’s haunting remnants. With the floating city of Columbia and the new challenges that await us, it’s safe to say that we can cope with Irrational’s wanderings until Infinite takes to the skies in 2012.
Via GamaSutra.
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