INSIDE THE STUDIO: A NEW PROGRAMMER'S EXPERIENCE AT 2K BOSTON

II graduated from college on April 26th.  Five days later I started as a general programmer at 2K Boston on the Bioshock PS3 Challenge Rooms. I was one of only three programmers, and we had only a fewmonths to go from Concept to Shipping. It was sudden and frightening.

I had only two days to get over the shock of working with the creative and technical geniuses that made my favorite game, Bioshock, because after that I was thrown into a giant code base and given almost complete freedom to sink or swim under a mountain of tasks that needed to be completed fast.

As a new hire, the first task I was given was to implement the Challenge Timer. What is a challenge if you're not being timed? From a technical perspective, this is a walk in the park. I took the tried and true security alarm timer, and made it play backwards. It looked silly (a zero would flip down to a one, before magically becoming a nine) but it was functional. From there I iterated with our Assistant Producer Keith Shetler:

"Let's create a new timer animation, the security alarm timer really doesn't make sense for this"

"Let's give the timer millisecond precision"

"We might need this in a different format, the timer could break if a map is played for 25 days straight"

You'd be surprised how much work these people put into the most minor features.

Having completed the timer, I continued working with Keith on all User Interface changes that we needed for the Challenge Rooms.

Meanwhile, our lead programmer on the project, Jesse Johnson, started piling non-UI work onto my plate. From gameplay ("Is Harvesting or Saving really the only interaction we want with the Little Sister?") to graphics ("This particle code has about twenty different paths, so try not to get lost."); debugging ("Add a command to print out all textures in order of what's most likely to be streamed from the hard drive") to optimizations ("Make sure these shaders only precache for the Challenge Rooms."); tools ("The artists want to be able to place an object in the game that shoots out arcing beams of electricity to all nearby Splicers") to PS3 Trophies (There's one I couldn't get in a million years. I think the designers are just malicious.).

The work is hard, but the end result is that you can't look at the game without seeing my work. It's more than I could have dreamed of four months ago.

I feel honored to be working from sunup to sunset with these people. I'm constantly amazed by the creativity of our designers, the talent of our artists and the intelligence of our programmers. I can't wait to see what they come up with next.

 

- Shane Mathews, Programmer, 2K Boston