#ken Levine

[rapturesbest]

I fucking hate him so much

[doomed-jester]

[banging on Ken Levine's window] WHERE ARE THE BIG MOMMIES YOU COWARD

[cardboard-aliens]

ive been given a glitter text website and it awoke an important need to make ugly DA stamps HSDFUISDF

[something-in-the-seas]

You know, I joked about Judas being about cancel culture as a joke but it's actually real. It's just BioShock: Not Elizabeth gets Cancelled On Twitter.com. I'm so excited.

[bioshockblueprint]

I am very interested by the different materials and shaders used in this storm scene at the lighthouse during the beginning of Bioshock Infinite. It's difficult to reverse engineer them without having access to the proprietary* software that 2K used when making the game but I'm going to guess that most of the wet and slick effect is made via a shader on top of the material. I want to have a go at recreating a dupe to practice node based coding in UE5 :)

The streaks of rains on the wall are interesting. They're made with a panning normal texture and I've done something similar in the past though it's always been on glass and not on an opaque texture. I would have to try that.

The sea is really cool. I have made a moving sea material before with parameters allowing me to edit the intensity of the waves, however the foam texture looks quite complex. The foam crashing on the jetty I believe could be made with a particle effect.

I hope I can fidn a way to rip the scene or find the textures somewhere so I can look into this.

* I have since learned that 2k used Unreal Engine 3.5. This means I still don't have access to all the textures they used or how their shaders looked like under the hood but I have way greater chances to be able to dig to find more informations now!!! Exciting stuff!!

[tuttle-did-it]

40 years today.

Hawkeye: Look, I know how tough it is for you to say goodbye, so I'LL say it. Maybe you're right, maybe we WILL see each other again, but just in case we don't, I want you to know how much you've meant to me. I'll never be able to shake you; whenever I see a pair of big feet or a cheesy mustache, I'll think of you. 

B.J.: Whenever I smell month-old socks, I'll think of YOU. 

Hawkeye: Or the next time somebody nails my shoe to the floor... 

B.J.: ...or when somebody gives me a martini that tastes like lighter fluid. 

Hawkeye: I'll miss you. 

B.J.: I'll miss YOU. A lot. I can't imagine what this place would've been like if I hadn't found you here.

Happy 40th to the most romantic divorce in cinematic history.

[druvjelly]

Introducing my new OTP! It’s between the creator of miraculous (Thomas astruc) and the creator of bioshock (Ken Levine). I call it writers cock (thanks @the-robot-bracket for the name).

I made this ship because both of them like to make canon more confusing, butcher characters or pretend their existence in canon never mattered, and like, their relationship with the female heroine of the series (i saw the body pillow tweet Ken) They’ve probably done other similar things to but I can’t remember all of their actions.

They were MADE for each other I swear /s

[lyinginahammock]

BioShock

Imagine being so fucking wrong about everything that 25 years after you die a videogame is published that is a detailed, thorough exploration of how fucking wrong you were about everything. This videogame makes it so that an entire generation views your work as what the videogame was about and they don't take you seriously, killing any serious cultural impact you may have had. This game is also considered to be one of the greatest videogames of all time, and its iconography, mechanics, and design are ingrained in pop culture in a way your works never were, and the game becomes an indelible part of a medium.

POV you're Ayn Rand and you got owned by Ken Levine's BioShock.

[bioshook-wynand]

OKAY WAS ANYONE GONNA TELL ME THERES A BIOSHOCK SPINOFF OR??????

[lightdrizzel]

finding it extremely funny that Ken Levine has been sitting in his personal studio all these years, working on his new game, and it’s Bioshock In Space

[searchforgeek]

The Anticipation Builds: "Judas" Poised to be a Spiritual Successor to Bioshock

In the ever-evolving landscape of video games, few titles have managed to capture the imagination and hearts of players like the Bioshock series. With its unique blend of atmospheric storytelling, immersive environments, and thought-provoking narratives, Bioshock has left an indelible mark on the gaming industry. However, as the echoes of Rapture and Columbia fade into the annals of gaming…

[renposter]

Rapture's Skyline, Bioshock 1 (2007)...

From here.

[bioshockblueprint]

You guys! While in class today I chatted with my teacher who revealed to me that BioShock Infinite was made straight into Unreal Engine 3.5! Until now I had been convinced that it had been made in a proprietary software but no, it's just Unreal!! I'm going to go through my last posts on here to correct it.

But yeah, this makes me super excited to continue learning about the development of BioShock Infinite! I have a couple of posts lined up I want to make.

[superectojazzmage]

Thinking about doing a BioShock replay so getting this old essay/observation thing I had in my drafts for awhile and actually making it, but something I’ve kinda realized is that the reason (or maybe just one reason) that BioShock Infinite isn’t as fantastic and well-constructed compared to the iconic original (or even 2) and has had people souring on it a lot in the years after it’s release is that it forgets the real core that BioShock was built around.

Namely that what BioShock is really about is video games themselves as a medium. BioShock is a story about video gaming, a meta exploration of video games and their gameplay, narratives, and developments. The world of Rapture is carefully constructed entirely around this idea.

Rapture is a small, isolated, contained location where people are free to do whatever they want within the confines of the “system”, just like the world of any video game. A playground where people can be whatever they want to be and do whatever they want to do without fear of consequences, even things that would be regarded as evil in a normal world.

Things like plasmids and vita-chambers and Adam and Eve are all video game mechanics taken to their logical conclusion — upgrades/spells you have to genetically modify yourself into a monster to use, checkpoints that literally stitch your mutilated body back together when you come close to death so you can keep “playing”, experience points that are an actual physical substance you need to acquire to become stronger, power-ups and health pickups that are literally just addictive drugs in hypodermic needles.

And, of course, the famous “would you kindly” twist and everything involving Atlas/Fontaine and the way you can do things/use items that all the NPCs and enemies can’t is all one big warp on the idea of player characters and how players behave in video games. Your character is basically a human robot, a living weapon bred and altered and programmed from birth to be able to be like that.

You can use checkpoints and do all these freakish upgrades to your body because you’re built to be able to. You do everything the objective marker/weirdo over the radio tells you to is because that’s what you usually do in video games you’re programmed to do it, and it’s engrained so thoroughly in you that even after the spell is ostensibly broken, you just instinctively default to following a different voice’s orders. And the splicers, those dumb enemies you’re fighting? Previous players of the “game” who got in too deep and now stalk the maps, killing everything in sight and obsessively hunting for more experience points and unlockables.

The characters of Rapture, the people who built it, are twisted parodies of game developers. A controlling, hypocritical, and narcissistic auteur director, Andrew Ryan, who doesn’t believe in anything except himself and his “vision”. The pretentious prima-donna artists and writers like Sander Cohen who pour their neuroses into the work and on their coworkers. Character designers represented with a crazed surgeon, Steinman, who views people like paintings. An environmental designer, Langford, so obsessed with getting every detail right and perfecting the trees that she doesn’t notice or care about the office around her burning. Uncaring, abusive managers and producers like Suchong who don’t care what they have to do to get the project done. Cutthroat meddling executives like Fontaine who slip into the artistic world and play it for their own ends. And all around them, hapless programmers and play-testers and interns responsible for the actual nuts and bolts that make the game function suffering under the crunch or being discarded at a moment’s notice when they’re “outmoded” or try to unionize.

The central point of BioShock at its core, is to deconstruct and examine the nature of the medium and genres of video games. It is an exploration of what a world would have to be in order to function like a video game world does, it’s setting carefully constructed around this idea, and the answer is… a horror story. It’s a tale that can only really be told as a video game, because it is so inextricably linked to that medium of storytelling.

Infinite doesn’t have ANY of that.

There’s no consideration for the artform and construction of video games, no commentary on gaming culture and ideas. The worldbuilding has no central theme beyond whatever theme was in Ken Levine’ head at the moment, hence why the game cycles through God knows how many ideas without doing justice to any of them and has a completely nonsensical setting and overall plot that looks superficially smart but falls apart at a moment’s examination. The characters don’t map to anything. The gameplay doesn’t map to anything, and in fact is usually completely incongruous with the setting and story. The only thing that maybe could be seen as a twist on the gaming medium is the multiverse plot point/lighthouse scene possibly reflecting on the idea of sequels, but even then it’s so half-formed that I can’t even really discern what point they’re trying to make.

You mindlessly slaughter thousands of people to get to the next cutscene where your characters suddenly become actual thinking humans again and start responding to death realistically. You down drinkable plasmids that are barely even tangentially acknowledged by the narrative.

Compare how intensely interwoven things like plasmids and vita-chambers are with the story and worldbuilding of OG BioShock with how vestigial and barely acknowledged similar things are in Infinite. Compare the complexity and nuance of OG BioShock’s setting and characters with the cartoonish stereotypes and simplicity of Infinite’s entire cast except maybe Booker and Elizabeth themselves. Infinite can barely pick a single thesis to discuss, let alone grapple with its nature as a video game. If BioShock 1 and 2 are a story that could only be told in video game form, Infinite is like a book or movie shaped peg that Ken Levine is smashing into a video game hole.

I don’t know where I’m going with this other then making this observation but yeah. I am curious if Levine will have learned the lesson with his upcoming not-BioShock game Judas, or if it’s going to be the same pretentious bundle of incoherently jammed together ideas that Infinite was.

[lowsodiumscifi]

Screenshots taken from the Judas trailer. This game looks fire! From the creators of bioshock too!

[kingoftieland]

I’ve always been a huge fan of the BioShock series, and 2013’s BioShock Infinite remains one of my all-time favorites to this day. That’s why I’m very lucky to have one of the rare physical copies of “The Psychology of Dissent,” which now sells for well over $200 if you can find one. 📖

Authored by Irrational Games writer Joe Fielder with creative director Ken Levine, the formerly titled “Mind in Revolt” is a prequel to BioShock Infinite and provides insight into the mysterious sky-city of Columbia prior to the events of the game. Printed in full color, this hardcover book is bound in faux-leather paper and stamped with the official seal of the Comstock House Re-Education Center. Featuring artwork by Jorge Lacera and Zoe Brookes, approximately 48 pages long and decorated with concept art as well as inked illustrations, Mind in Revolt is a true artifact of Columbia.