The Bioshock Infinite DLC took players away from the floating city of Columbia to France, and what better way to indicate the player is in France than a young boy gleefully dancing around large pole while holding a baguette over his head? None I tell you, and that’s exactly what we got.
“Baguette Boy” became an instant hit with fans thanks to his joyful dance and we now know why he exists. Gwen Frey, ex Bioshock developer has admitted she placed the cheerful chap in the game and has explained all.
“I was populating the Paris scene with “chumps” (skeletal meshes of humans with no AI). I’d play a looping animation on a person, script some head-tracking or whatever, & request VO lines from the writers to flesh them out,” she tweeted. “For perf reasons we couldn’t afford to have proper AI pathfinding around, so most of the background characters were “chumps”. And we didn’t have a ton of resources for dlc so I was mostly reusing animations from the base game.”
“I thought the Paris scene was too static & needed more motion, I but couldn’t afford another AI walking around. I figured a chump running in a circle around that cylinder could work since I could just expand the collision of it to prevent the player from running through them,” she continues.
However there was an issue, there was no “running in a circle” animation path available but a group of characters did dance around in a circle in another part of the game. Deciding that two random adults dancing around the pole would be “dumb” she instead chose to use a couple of children.
“However, the kids had different proportions than the adults, so the kids’ feet were clipping through the ground and their hands were going through each other,” she explained. “I turned on foot and arm ik so that their hands and feet would end up in the same position as the adults, but then their hands were way over their heads! So I deleted the boy’s dancing partner and attached a baguette to his hands.”
“Bam! Boy dances with baguette! Ship it! I figured if anyone asked I’d just say “bread is great right?!” I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but this boy is the most viral thing I’ve ever made,” concludes Gwen.
Source: Twitter
