First Experience with Ubisoft & Work on For Honor

I began to work at Ubisoft in spring 2016, so it’s been 2 years and a half since I joined the industry. In term of challenges, I was rushing so hard during the 3 years of my bachelor that when I joined the For Honor team, I expected to crunch again as the game was due to be shipped in less than a couple of months. In fact, I had the best integration ever without any stress and with a lot of time to finish my first task. The team was really caring and they wanted me to adapt well as I transitioned from being a student to a professional.

A thing I realized quickly was that the school taught us a lot of techniques and tips but there is a lot of specific stuff that school will never teach. For example, in For Honor, the camera can pass through the walls or buildings (camera occlusion) and when it does, you can observe the interior of assets rendered with a grey noise shader. For making this shader work properly, you need to close the edges of every single mesh otherwise it will show highlighted ugly holes when passing through them. The decals are the exception.

In terms of work, one of my challenges was to adapt to the AAA workflow in a team of a few hundred people. The communication quickly became a priority, especially in the environment art department where there were many artists of different specialties all dependent on each other. Then, a few months later after finishing For Honor, a brand new type of production task appeared: keep supporting the game that will go live. Every 3 months through the year after the launch we had to ship 2 new maps with different level design. That would mean way less time than usual for producing those maps and we clearly had to be more proactive and partly readjust our production pipeline after the 1st delivery. The first season delivery (Shadow and Might – Season 2) was at the same time my biggest challenge and one of my biggest pride since I joined the industry.