INSIDE THE STUDIO: Welcome to the World of BioShock PS3

Hi all!

I’m pleased to be able to kick off the first of an ongoing series – Inside the Studio -- from the BioShock PS3 development team. This will be an exclusive series for the Cult of Rapture, so that we can keep you, our most avid fans, updated on progress of the PS3 version of BioShock. We’ll be spreading the writing around throughout the teams so that over time, we can give you a variety of perspectives on the progress and the features we’re working on for BioShock PS3.

For this first diary, I’ll just give an update as to what’s going on in our various offices these days. The programmers and the testers are the most busy right now, as we’re in the final stages of tuning and optimizing the PS3 build, and we’re working closely with both onsite and remote test teams in order to track down and destroy as many bugs as possible. Because we’ve got four different studios in different time zones working on the game,  some particularly tricky bugs get passed from one side of the world to the other (from 2KBoston or 2KMarin to our 2KAustralia studio) so that we can keep working on them for more hours per day. We’re also preparing for the first hands-on demo of the PS3 version, which is coming up very soon, and we’re getting ready for some more upcoming events where we can start to show a little more of what’s new in the PS3 version. Since we’re pretty far along in development, this mostly means checking over the builds carefully to make sure everything looks good and no unexpected bugs have popped up.

Our web developer team has been working very hard to update the BioShock web site for the new launch, and Elizabeth has been coming by with great ideas for new additions and treats to add to the Cult of Rapture web site (and some other interesting projects that she’s working on in the background). We’ve been very excited to have new articles about and screenshots  from the PS3 version appear, and there’s a new marketing campaign in the works as well.

The developers have been starting to jump into the forums to answer as many “Questions for the Team” as they can.There are some questions that we can’t answer until a bit later when we’ve had a chance to reveal a bit more about our PS3 plans, so please bear with us if we’re silent on a few topics for now.

If there’s questions or topics you’d like to see addressed over the course of this series, we’ll be starting a thread in the forums to take your suggestions and comments. I look forward to seeing your feedback!

- Alyssa Finley, Executive Producer, 2K Marin