Perth Chapter Meeting Report – 29^th January 2008

BioShock – The producer’s perspective

Tony Oakden, the producer of BioShock PC treated The Velvet Lounge to some insights on producing the highly acclaimed BioShock. Tony’s role was as producer of the PC version of the game, produced in Canberra, while at the same time the Xbox 360 version was being developed in the Boston. BioShock was released in a transitional period for the PC, with operating systems moving from Windows XP to Windows Vista, and graphics moving from DX9 to DX10 technology. This created extra challenges for its development, with the game having to work with a wide array of software and hardware and extra pressure with OS and hardware vendors needing to show off their new technology as superior.
	Another challenge for the game was keeping the vision on track. With a development team who were role playing game fanatics, whilst marketing was pushing a hard core first person shooter, something had to give. In the end, the skill and commitment of the team saw a great product that was commercially and critically successful.
The night ended with the drawing of the raffle. Prizes included an autographed copy of BioShock, Halo 3 Limited Edition from Gametraders, along with some great hardware from Anyware, One Stop Entertainment and Crumpler. The next IGDA Perth event will be held in March and feature a post-mortem of the Game Developers Conference, from the perspective of the local Australian developers attending.