Forrest Dowling

My work on Bioshock Infinite covered most of the game, however my primary area of responsibility were the opening levels. They spanned from The Welcome Center through Monument Island, where the player first encounters Elizabeth. Much of my work appears in the trailer above.

My direct responsibilities included event pacing and implementation, and directing the group of designers working on the levels I was overseeing. As the owner of the opening areas, I was responsible for the seamless integration of a large amount of training on the player's path. By the time they arrived at Monument Island, they needed to understand a large number of game concepts, as well as the motivations of the main characters within the world.

One of the large challenges associated with building Infinite was dealing with elegant bail-outs from scripted sequences. There were many narrative sequences through out the early levels of the game that featured civilians with a script to read, that the player could interrupt at any moment. We also had a very high density of narrative moments, so there was a constant balancing act associated with pacing the firing conditions of different moments so dialog wouldn't step on adjacent lines and moments.

On the levels above, I specifically:

- Pitched events & moments to other leads prior to producing them

- Scripted event triggers, such as overheard conversations, and world interactions such as the purchasing system within the honor system store

- Animated floating worlds using Unreal's Matinee animation system

- Set up and later optimized memory and streaming for a hitch free experience on PS3 & 360

- Scripted AI placement & intros in combat & non-combat scenarios

- Distributed loot & pickups

- Built the skylines and scripted the freight & AIs that use them

- Scripted level transitions, including support for retraversal of previously visited levels (a surprisingly complicated process)

- I also functioned as one of two 'finishers' on the content team. I and one other designer were the only two content creators that touched the game for bug fixing for the final 2 months of development. My greatest accomplishment on Infinite is perhaps all the bugs that the player will never encounter.

- I made the mechanical horse at the entry to Columbia not kill you when it touched you, or force you out of the world or into walls, or walk in place if it hit you, or rag doll other AIs as they walked around it, or drag you along with it if you touched it, or bounce you out of the world if you jumped on it, or float in bind pose if you leave and come back and look at it, or.... (you get the idea)

My work on demo this focused on the later half, in which the player rides the Sky-Lines. I pitched and implemented the events depicted from the first Sky-Line attach to the dismount at the end.

As our 1st major gameplay demo featuring Sky-Lines, it was extremely important to clearly demonstrate the feel of 'riding a roller coaster while firing a machine gun'. Sky-Lines were intended to provide the player with a critical escape option from large AOE attacks, such as a zeppelin bombardment.

This proved to be a critical proof of concept and benchmark for Sky-Line implementation on the project. It also was a valuable proving ground for our authoring tech. Some of the biggest problems to overcome while creating this demo were centered around getting AIs to reliably ride and dismount Sky-Lines in a way that would produce a reliably choreographed demo.

Clash in the Clouds (CitC) was the first part of the season pass for Bioshock Infinite. I was the lead designer on it, and was responsible for completing it within a very tight time frame with a small team.

The primary goal of CitC was to create a fun replayable challenge for players who were drawn to Infinite for the combat experience. We were able to push combat scenarios in directions unique from the main game, due to the lack of narrative constraints, as well as a greater resource overhead available when no narrative content was present.

A number of new features were implemented to support the core combat focus. We added leaderboards, changed the way that gear was awarded, added a scoreboard UI, added a scoring system that rewarded variety, and created a challenge system known as "the blue ribbon challenges".