INSIDE THE STUDIO: BIOSHOCK PS3 IN AUSTRAILA

Hello everyone! My name is Ben Driehuis and I'm a programmer at 2K Australia. I'm here to talk about how progress is going on BioShock PS3 and exactly what we are doing down here in the 2K Australia Studio. In Australia we have five programmers working on the PS3 version of BioShock as well as one dedicated QA person and we get to work as the others in the US sleep! First I'll talk about the other guys I am working with.

Our Lead Programmer for BioShock PS3 in Australia is Mathi Nagarajan. He has been working at 2K Australia now for over four years and worked on BioShock XBOX 360 and PC. Weicheng Fang and Daniel Lamb also worked on the XBOX 360 and PC versions of BioShock and are bringing all that knowledge with them to the PS3 version. The other two programmers are myself and Tim Cooper. Tim joined us in February and this is his first taste of game development. As for myself, I have been with 2K Australia since the beginning of last year and worked on the XBOX 360 Demo of BioShock mostly. Our internal QA Tester is Simon Richardson, he only started recently as well and is a big BioShock fan.

The game is coming along very nicely at the moment and we are excited that it is only a few months till PS3 owners get their hands on BioShock! The team here in 2K Australia, as well as the other teams in 2K Boston, 2K Marin and Digital Extremes are working extremely hard to try and make BioShock an even better gaming experience!

Right now we are nearing beta which is a really exciting time for us, but also a stressful time as it means final Sony Certification and then gold are now quite close! The crew here down under have been putting in long hours lately, but thankfully our partners are very understanding and as a result the game is really coming along in leaps and bounds!

I'm sure a lot of you are asking the question, what exactly is 'beta', 'certification' and 'gold' and how do we get to that point? Some of you have probably taking part in public betas before. Betas are pretty much complete versions of the final games and we are now just looking into bugs and performance issues. The gameplay and content is complete at this stage. The length of beta is different for every game and generally we try to have as much of the development cycle in beta as possible. During beta we have a lot more QA working on the game, as well as have all our machines run automatic testing overnight so we can catch more issues.

We only finish beta once we pass certification and then the game will go 'gold'. Gold means the game is completed and now gets packaged up and produced to get ready for the release date and the development team no longer changes anything in the game. (Not including patches of course). It takes a few weeks to get the game ready for release worldwide and so in that time we wait nervously to see if you guys love the game as much as we do!

So what about certification. This is a process all PS3 games must complete and is done by Sony. Basically Sony will test our game for a few weeks, making sure that we reach the standards required of all PS3 games. Some things are basic, like making sure we use the correct terms for hardware, controller inputs. There are also performance requirements and handling all the cool PS3 features, like Trophies. We have to pass certification to release the game so it's one of our main priority during beta. What happens if we fail certification? Well we obviously are planning to pass it the first time, but if a game does fail, it can be resubmitted again, with the things that failed last time fixed. So don't worry, a game failing certification should have no affect on you.

Being in Australia has its benefits and challenges. As I mentioned earlier, our team gets to work on the project while the other studios are in bed (or at the very least should be in bed!). The good thing about this is we get 24 hour development and it's nice to come into the office and see that the game has been improved whilst we were at home. The challenge is keeping everyone else in the project up to speed with was is going on and who is working on what. It's very easy to get two people looking at the same issue.

So communication is paramount so that we don't waste any time and we all send out daily emails letting everyone else know what we did during the day and what we are currently working on. Of course the bug database helps as well but it's very easy for identical bugs to be raised, so constant contact between the teams is important. We also have weekly phone conference meetings and of course use phones and IM programs for more immediate contact.

Now let me give you an update on to what we have actually being doing here in the 2K Australia office. Mathi, as well as managing us down here, is working on the rendering system, as well as memory and performance optimisation. Daniel assisted Mathi in getting the rendering system working on PS3 and did a lot of work in the shader system, as well as doing a lot of memory management and optimisation. Weicheng has worked on bug fixes and optimisations and the sound system. Tim has been improving the graphics and fixing graphics bugs which pop up. Myself I've been working on general game systems, memory and performance optimisations and getting our PS3 tool chains working effectively. Right now we are all working hard on fixes bugs and trying to optimise the game even more.

We can't wait to get this game out to you all and we are hoping you guys will enjoy it as much as we have making it!

- Ben Driehuis, Programmer, 2K Australia