The days of two developers making games in a shed are over. Newcastle’s Ubisoft-owned Reflections shows that studio collaboration is key to 21st-century titles

They quite literally don't make games the way they used to

Spend any time with your grandparents and at some stage the age-old phase “they don’t make them like they use to” will pop up as nostalgia gets the better of them. Usually it’s just the rose-tinted glasses talking, but for video games it’s a fact: they quite literally don’t make them like they used to.

Back in the 1980s, when the industry was in its infancy, games were often created by two-person teams consisting of one programmer and one artist. In the 1990s, sprites gave way to 3D modelling, and development teams mushroomed in size, hoovering up specialists in disciplines across animation, level design, character modelling and artificial intelligence.

Today, creating the most advanced, triple-A games has become too big a task for a single developer leading to the rise of what is best described as a modular approach, where different developers work on different parts of a single game.

Old dog, new tricks

One developer that is pioneering the modern modular approach is no spring chicken. Set up in 1984, Newcastle-based Reflections swiftly established a reputation for bringing cutting-edge graphics to side-scrollers such as Shadow of the Beast and the gloriously named Brian the Lion. It then morphed into a driving-game specialist, thanks primarily to the Destruction Derby and Driver franchises.

French publisher Ubisoft acquired the studio in 2006, expanding its remit way beyond its previous practice of churning out a new Driver game every three years or so.

Reflections is crafting the vehicle components of the upcoming Watch Dogs 2 and Ghost Recon Wildlands and has just finished the Underground downloadable content (DLC) pack for The Division. It’s finishing Grow Up, the sequel to 2015’s Grow Home – ironically, a small, innovative download game made by a 90s-style 10-person team.

Plus, it built roughly the half of the virtual Manhattan featured inThe Division, along with six of its story missions and various bits of the user interface. In recent years, it has worked on Ubisoft games as diverse as Assassin’s Creed Syndicate and Just Dance.

Reflections managing director Pauline Jacquey, a French native, identifies several upsides to the modular development approach, having introduced two extra “pillars”: the small incubator that created Grow Home and Grow Up, and the level-design and general action-adventure expertise, as seen in The Division – to the developer’s driving-game skills.

Jacquey acknowledges it is unhealthy for a developer to feel its future depends on a single three-year project, like 2011’s Driver: San Francisco: “Driver: San Francisco was not the commercial success we wanted it to be – it was a success, but not enough to cover the spending on it. It led the team to feel a bit that if it failed, it was a big catastrophe, and I worked really, really hard to make them understand that it’s OK to fail.

“Ubisoft is a company in which you’re OK to fail, because you’re learning from that. The fact that we now have these three pillars in our strategy goes a long way to remove a lot of stress, because we’re balanced.”

Ridding game development of the 1950s approach

The modular development approach also chimes with Jacquey’s desire to bring modern, enlightened working practices to the world of development – a world epitomised by “crunch” periods in the final stages of a game’s creation when, so the cliche goes, developers work all hours, sleep under their desks and exist on a diet of pizza and Coke. film

No such quasi-slavery on Jacquey’s watch: “I would hate to run a company where everybody feels it’s like the 50s. I’m trying to do the right things but the right way, so the goal doesn’t justify the means.

“My ideal is that for anybody here, their personality should be totally aligned with what they do in their job. And then you get quality and happiness, and you win on all fronts.”

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Reflections’ approach, Jacquey acknowledges, involves laying aside what could be seen as the company’s ego: “In the past, the image of the studio was linked to the image of the game – there was a total match between Driver as a franchise and Reflections. Today it’s more about the teams, and about the culture and about our values. And I find it a bit more sustainable and modern.”

The presence of members of the vehicle team with over 20 years’ service at Reflections bears out that shift. Ben Merrick, a vehicle realisation expert who has been at Reflections 13 years, is happy to put vehicles into other studios’ games: “I love it, because vehicles have been my passion ever since I was a kid, so the ability to put vehicles and computer games together is great.

“Regarding the collaboration, you’re involved in more projects, so you see them getting to the shelf, and you’re getting that pleasure of making things that are getting into people’s hands.”

Jacquey points out that the days of even the most fiercely independent developers working on big games on their own are well and truly over: “In 2016, you’ll never do a game in isolation, regardless of whether or not you’re the lead developer – it doesn’t happen.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Collaboration is the name of the game at the French-owned company. Photograph: Reflections

“We work with co-development partners, marketing teams, community development teams, we work with players and we work with first-parties [like Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo].”

It’s not entirely rosy, of course. Jacquey admits that communication can pose problems: “It’s difficult. Obviously, everything is much simpler when everybody is located in the same area. But it’s simpler this way as well, because you’re not going through the difficulties of working with people who know more than you or different things than you.

“So yes, we sometimes face cultural differences and it’s not always easy: misunderstandings are happening much more. But at the same time, when it works, it’s fantastic, because then it’s sharing a culture and getting the best of both sides. And that means that you can progress much, much faster, and I’m sure that’s one of the reasons for Ubisoft’s success.”

‘There was a bit of fear, but it was the good fear’

Evidence suggests that approach is paying off. Underground, which takes the Division’s action into the New York subway, might be the most hi-tech slab of DLC ever, as it uses procedural generation to ensure every mission you undertake in it is randomly generated and unique. Randomly generated dungeons have featured in old-school RPGs for years, but not in anything as complex as the Division.

Jacquey acknowledges that the decision to put procedural generation to the test was due to time constraints: “There was a bit of fear, but it was the good fear, like: ‘Ah, let’s do it.’ It’s like the fear just before jumping.”

With around 300 employees and plenty of ambition, it comes as a surprise to find that Jacquey complains of a problem that afflicts large swathes of the UK developer community: an inability to recruit staff.

“We have 35 openings today, and we have a pretty ambitious growth strategy for the future. We’re not looking for juniors – we’re looking for seniors and experts, so that makes recruitment harder, of course,” she said.

It’s a problem that the games industry fears Brexit will amplify. Although Refections employs hundreds of Britons, the British higher education system has failed to provide games developers with enough graduates who possess the skills they need for years, so the industry has consistently looked to central and eastern Europe, as well as north America, for a significant proportion of its recruits.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The award-winning firm looks set for further success, with the upcoming releases of Watch Dogs 2 and Ghost Recon Wildlands. Photograph: Reflections

Whatever happens in the future, the French-owned company looks set to go from strength to strength.

You will be able to see for yourself in two of the most-anticipated games in development, this Christmas’s Watch Dogs 2 and next year’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, plus the imminent Underground pack for The Division and the whimsical, original Grow Up. All of which offers proof of the importance of cross-national collaboration.