From Game Jam to the Creation of Starlink: Battle for Atlas

[Music] so thank you all very much for coming out on monday or wednesday morning sorry uh to see my talk i'm super super excited to share this with you this is uh a project that very very passionate about uh and you know in particular the journey uh that we've taken to get here has been something that has had great successes and great lessons learned along the way and uh you know i can't wait to share both uh with all of you now the first thing i need to clarify uh is i only had so many words to fit the title of the talking and uh and the length of our uh the name of our game is pretty long and that took up a lot of the words so the first thing i need to clarify is that uh there wasn't no specific game gem you know this wasn't something that like we all went to to jam and you know spent the 48 hours and came up with a thing and then pitched it to ubisoft and turned it into

a game or something uh rather what we were trying to do was take inspiration from game jam techniques and game gem culture and find a path to adapt that and scale that to aaa game development and the conception of a new aaa ip and a few months ago i had the honor and privilege of announcing uh this ip to the world at e3 uh where i got to go up and and you know share the the fruits of our labor with everyone and you know i couldn't be more proud of the work that the team has done uh to create this and i can't wait for you know we only gave a little snippet uh of what we're doing and i can't wait for everyone to see more this is an ip that has a lot of innovation throughout and you know at the core of that is this uh completely modular you know peripheral where you're able to add on wings and weapons and parts and everything and everything you add on is

instantly recreated in the game and it totally changes the way that you play and so today i want to tell you about uh our journey and our story for how we got there uh how we tried to reinvent uh brainstorming and a typical conception process uh to come up with the ip in the first place how we had some stumbles along the way as we tried to grow and expand that process and then how we had to regain our footing and refined our balance uh to close out production and really bring everything back together but first i want to start uh with a fun and terrifying part of starting a new ip which is the conception phase and in order to tell this story i've got to go way way way back to the beginning of the story which is the ending of another story of splinter cell blacklist uh splenius of blacklist was the first

project from ubisoft toronto studio and at the time everyone at the studio had been working together to ship it and i had joined usf toronto during the production of blacklist and we worked through that and brought that to a close and at the end of that project as with many studios people start splitting up and and going onto separate things and particularly at toronto uh we went from one project to lots of projects really quick and since then toronto has been uh has done many very successful collaborations on far cry primal far cry 4 far cry 5 uh watch dogs 2 assassins creed unity you know many of ubisoft's biggest brands but at the time we also were given a chance uh to try something new and crazy and i'm still not sure exactly how i uh lucked out and got this opportunity but i was given the opportunity to take a very small group of people uh and we were given this mandate it looked like this to

basically come up with something new and as far as mandates go this one was really wide open you know explore innovative gameplay and next-gen hardware which at the time meant xbox one and ps4 uh with the goal of creating a mainstream concept for development so you know this is really a blank slate and this kind of freedom is incredibly liberating uh and incredibly terrifying uh because it is super super challenging to know where to go uh especially with very limited resources when you have you know just this wide open space ahead of you so we formed a a little prototyping group that we called tomcat i don't know why uh and it was eight people to start two artists two programmers two game designers one animator and a

manager and uh at this point i need to give a huge shout out at the time we had two leads so it was myself i was the manager and we had a lead designer named james everett and he and i uh really worked very closely together to come up with this process so a huge shout out to him he can't be here today but we worked really closely together on on this process uh so we had this group of people and these were a wonderful group of people uh who i thoroughly enjoyed working with but to be fair uh we were kind of the island of misfit toys uh this is a group of people that you know when when all of the project selection and and things came up and they were like okay do you want to work on you know the next big far cry thing or you know the next assassin's creed or whatever it was um these were the group of people that you know went dashing into the unknown and said i want to do the thing that's called tomcat but otherwise we know nothing about uh and so you know it's a group of

people that uh participated in a lot of game gems um you know we're really attracted by coming up with brand new things and iterating on that uh but it was also a group of people that really you know in many ways wanted to rebel against the standard structure and process and way that we do things and way that things happen and so you know we wanted to just reinvent everything tear up all the rules and and do something crazy so we looked at you know how we would traditionally go about uh coming up with a new ip as a starting point so we'd say okay well well we got a bunch of people got eight people so we'll all get in a room we'll brainstorm tons of ideas we'll like put stuff up on the wall and then we'll all you know try to pick or or you know the leads will try to pick and we'll say yeah this is the best idea let's do that we build a demo out of it and we polish that up and bring that to paris and pitch it it'll be amazing it'll be awesome high five uh but you know when we looked at this

and we looked at this process and the kind of initial expectation we had four big problems that we saw that we didn't like about how this typical process works the first we all kind of hated brainstorming uh in a traditional sense and one of the big problems that we have with brainstorming uh is this effect of you know the loudest people in the room and the loudest ideas resonating not necessarily the best ideas uh typically if you you know throw 10 people in a room and say okay we're going to brainstorm this new thing everyone gets talking and you know you immediately start filtering down to three or four voices that are dominating this conversation and the ideas are mostly coming from them and there's a lot of people that i you know have wonderful ideas that are going unheard because they're you know being spoken over or they can't get the word in or they're not comfortable you know jumping into that fray

the second problem is biased selection i've got two young kids right now and uh you know with two young kids there's always these events and holidays and things that roll around and uh you know you get a lot of these like best dad in the world things and and and i think i'm a pretty good dad uh but you know statistically uh best dad in the world is probably a stretch and you know we had uh similar worries with um our james and i you know in a leadership role with our biases affecting uh this process where if we were going in and and ideas are cropping up and people are throwing stuff on the wall uh you know we come from a very uh you know james and they both had kind of similar um uh perspectives and and similar interests uh similar enough you know we we came from

similar backgrounds and you know looking at that we were really worried that this wasn't necessarily going to be the idea that resonated uh with a wider audience you know the ideas that resonated to kind of two 30-something white guys grew up in canada uh would give us a fairly limited perspective and a limited selection the third problem sounded good on paper okay big caveat i i do not want to insult any game designers uh out there i love game designers uh but uh i think the best game designers uh are kind of like the best batters in baseball right and when you write uh a pitch on paper you write a design down and you're like okay this is how this feature is going to work it's going to be amazing the best designers are probably batting at you know a 40 success rate of that idea actually translating into something that's really compelling and fun when you make it and more often than not you know once

you take that design that sounded great on paper and and make it into a game and you spend you know the months developing that feature you come back to it you say oh yeah actually uh we have to change that it was kind of flawed or didn't work exactly as we expected and the fourth problem which takes a little bit of explanation uh something called the secretary problem quick show of hands does anyone know what this means anyone know what this is uh navi knows um so the secretary problem is a mathematical problem uh with a kind of dated name and the secretary problem speaks to the challenge of how to select the best sample from a data set when you have to go through them linearly so the idea is this kind of fictional scenario is you're trying to hire a secretary secretaries are all different quality some of them are great some of them are bad and when you interview them you can assess the quality of that person but for whatever reason in this fictional scenario once you say no

and reject that applicant they're gone forever and you can never like call them back um and so the challenge is how many people do you interview before you take the next best one right if you interview two three people someone great comes along and you're like oh they seem good let's just hire them how do you know that three people down the line you wouldn't have someone much better uh and so we were really worried about this with our uh brainstorming and conception process we were brainstorming some ideas some of them sounded cool uh you know maybe we'd even make a prototype and that would be cool but how did we know that if we hadn't gone a couple more rounds we wouldn't have come up with something much more compelling so we had these four problems and you know we looked at them and was okay let's you know how are we going to address these how are we going to change our process to try to mitigate this as best as we could so what we decided to do one we wanted to rethink the typical brainstorming process and i'll go through that in more detail in a second

second we wanted to make it completely democratic and fair in order to use our tiny team both as the idea generation and development but also as our uh smallest and easiest validation of the ideas uh we would have people vote on the best ideas and make it a completely fair and democratic process third we'd prototype as many things as possible in order to validate that what was you know sounded fun on paper uh actually was a compelling idea we would rapidly prototype as many things as possible to validate their success and fourth once we had those prototypes once we had that no matter how compelling they were we would put it aside success or failure and completely restart from scratch with a new batch of ideas and we would do that for a period of time that you know we kind of figured out based on our schedule and you know at the end of that we'd look back over everything and say okay

out of all this time what were the ideas what were the best ideas uh that we came up with during that period so once we had those solutions we split this into a plan we had a two-week schedule where we would brainstorm pitch vote plan and then the second week we'd prototype and then rinse repeat go right back to the beginning and the first chunk of that is brainstorming so for us we had this challenge okay how do we how do we reinvent how do we do a better job with brainstorming the first problem we had was this wide open mandate uh you know how the heck are we gonna ask people to brainstorm we're like okay group of people go away uh just come up with anything i don't know like what are you into enter rpgs mmos you know just throw some ideas out there because our mandate could be anything uh so you know we had to give some focus to that uh we had to get some clarity as to where people should focus their brainstorming what what problem were they trying to solve

and so you know we worked on this idea of a guiding question it had to be an open-ended question we didn't want to force people into a corner uh but we wanted this kind of open-ended guiding question that could help uh clarify and give them a direction to go in so some examples of these questions what game would you create where the primary mechanic is collaboration what e for everyone game would you create with 10 000 simultaneous ai or human characters what exploration based game could only be accomplished on a living room console with a peripheral you know and there was a number of these different ideas and different questions that we put out there uh one of my personal favorites that i didn't put up here was uh what's a a game that could evoke a sense of discovery and wonder and would be a primary mechanic that could evoke a sense of discovery and wonder in players so once we had these questions uh we had to set about brainstorming those

and the first thing that we did to combat this problem of the loudest person in the room was we scaled the brainstorming way down to the smallest it could be with one person we'd start the first day of the week this is monday we've got the question out first thing and everyone goes off alone to think about that question and to brainstorm on their own and they could do a little bit of research check things out but they had the whole morning of the first day uh and we tasked everyone with writing down 25 compelling game game ideas uh based on that question and this doesn't sound too difficult right 25 is not that big of a number um i assure you if you try to go through the exercise it's much more challenging than you would think you tend to get through 10 15 ideas you're like yeah this is easy i am laughing this is awesome and then you get up to like 16 17 you're like okay this is a bit of a stretch and you know by the time you're at like 21 22

23 you hit 25 and you are like that is it this is the sum total of all possible human creativity about this subject there are no other ideas imaginable that could answer this question i've got them all but you know i am tapped out and when people hit that point we pair them up and all of a sudden you meet someone else from your team who's also done the same exercise coming up with 25 ideas and lo and behold somehow they've come up with a completely different set of 25 than you have oh they saw this problem from a totally different perspective they were coming at this from a different angle i didn't even think of interpreting it like that and so these two people would meet up they'd share their ideas they discussed their ideas and the remarkable thing is that now both people are invigorated they are suddenly seeing a different perspective that they never even thought of approaching this problem from and together as a pair they're tasked with coming up with an additional 25 ideas uh riffing off inspiration from each

other uh you know suddenly opening up entire new avenues of thought that neither of them considered but you know once they saw the angle that each of them came from it would open up this possibility so by the end of the first day each pair would have 75 ideas day two we do it again we take the pairs we pair them up so now we have groups of four they share the 150 ideas that they came up with the previous day and you know they start riffing and as a group now they're coming up with another 25. afternoon now we bring everyone in and we literally have hundreds of ideas when any individual couldn't possibly think of more than 25 now the whole team is empowered with a set of hundreds of ideas answering this open-ended question from which they can draw from and then the last step is to scale all the way back down

right back down to single solo work where each individual had two full days to take those hundreds of ideas to take all of that huge possibility space and condense that down into three pitches three slides each five minutes each that were you know fleshing some of those ideas out into something that they could they thought was a compelling and cohesive game pitch so they distill all of that info down and the end of day thursday we get everyone together in a room and it was very fun we had kind of a pitch day and everyone had their five minutes to go up uh or five minutes per to go up and present their pitches present their ideas and it was amazing seeing you know even the ideas that you had seen in in very early stages uh at a brainstorming level you know once people had really put thought in and attached images and kind of put some work in to put that

into a cohesive and fleshed out pitch uh it was absolutely incredible seeing these just dozens and dozens of amazing game pitches come together and i still think there are a treasure trove you know going back through our old files of so many games that i would love to make uh at some point in the future incredibly creative and diverse ideas um that you know we would never uh we would never have gotten through a traditional process once we had these pitches everyone voted uh we did this very simply we just gave everyone uh three little sticky circle sticky things and everyone went up and voted as people were pitching we'd write them down on the on the board and people could go up and vote on the ones that they wanted now one improvement to this uh this process is actually being taken and replicated uh over at magic leap in new zealand uh where james everett who is the original designer has gone to uh the lead designer and uh one of the improvements that they made

one of the iterations that they made on this process uh was to make the votes uh silent uh because you know you get some pattern of uh people looking at what other people are voting on and and steering that um we didn't do that when we did it originally and i i think it worked well but you know it may have just been the way that our that our group was structured and that we were going up so everyone would vote and uh after we'd voted we'd have three top voted pitches now many times these three top voted pitches uh actually came from four or five pitches it's it's really strange the way that kind of zeitgeist works that people have uh the same set of raw ideas that they're drawing from and sometimes you get pitches that you know we're going in a similar direction uh so rather than say like oh this one got slightly more votes we'd say those two pitches were pretty much along the same lines let's merge them you know let's combine the cool elements of both and turn that into one thing but essentially we'd boil it down to

three winning pitches each time and from there everyone would submit their preferences of like hey i'd love to work on prototyping this pitch or that pitch in order and we'd look and you know it was a very small team so we had to just make some decisions and break it up and you know each person would end up joining a small group of you know two three people as we grew maybe three four or five people to work on a prototype and we made three prototypes in a week every two weeks so we you know have one day the friday of that week to break into those groups sit down start talking start you know talking about how the heck in a week can we possibly prototype you know these were big game ideas these were like not a mini game these were pitches for something that could be a triple a game and so you know in a week how do you get down how do you boil down to the essence

of that idea and how do you validate that in the most efficient manner possible uh and there is never any extra time literally there is only a week that's it that's what you have to do uh so people would kind of come up with a plan and then in the afternoon we'd uh run those plans by the other groups get some feedback get some validation often you'd have suggestions uh for hey maybe you could use this technology maybe there's this tool you could use did you know that this was out there that would be helpful and then we had a week to validate by any means necessary we used different engines we used different tech that was available we made paper prototypes or acted things out or did anything we possibly could to prove this out and again this was a wonderful process it was a mad dash it was very uh intense uh for a week making all of these games and this resulted in all sorts of wild

and wacky prototypes across all sorts of different technologies and genres and things and uh lots of crazy stuff uh ar and and mobile things and whatever i don't even know what was going on here this is i'm sure it was a ton of fun um and and these photos were from something i mostly put them in just to embarrass these people that they were in my gdc presentation uh yeah these games were amazing i'm sure anyways we came up with all sorts of crazy prototypes uh one of those prototypes was actually uh really cool and uh i'll show you a quick video of it uh it was a game where you could it was used to connect and you could kind of make these silhouette paintings uh with your body and capture them and it's kind of a pictionary kind of thing right people would guess and uh you know this was something that we didn't think okay maybe this isn't something we're going to turn into a big aaa game but we

actually had a chance to show it to the world uh there's a all-night festival called nui blanche uh in toronto and so we went and projected it up on the story of a on the side of a seven-story building and had everyone come out and play it so it's super cool uh after we did all this prototyping uh we'd all get together uh big group play all these games uh have a ton of fun and give this really open and honest feedback on what worked what didn't and the power of this feeling of fairness because it was this democratic process you know everyone had been voting there wasn't one idea selected uh because you know the lead said uh this is the one we're gonna go this is the direction i want to go in everyone felt like it was a fair playing field where each of them had contributed to that and that had an incredible effect on people's willingness to step up uh you know give their honest thoughts on what was working what they were excited about what what fell through

and i think this is something that you actually see a lot in game gem culture as well you know this incredibly open and transparent and honest uh feedback and assessment i think it's a really positive part of that community that oftentimes we miss out and we get a little bit wrapped up in politics and you know power politics in in larger development after all that you know we had went for a while we had dozens of prototypes and you know we reached that point where we're like okay we really need to decide what we're gonna do and so we took a step back and we looked through um you know keeping in mind that secretary problem we had really given it a good a good run we had a bunch of stuff that we could select from and we looked back and out of everything one prototype really stood out it looked like this uh had humble origins it was a a wiimote kind of taped to a consumer electronics board with you know building blocks and copper wire

stuck to it uh but it worked and we made a demo you could fly around in space and grab asteroids and do neat things and it was a very rudimentary prototype you know you had to be careful not to make it fall apart as you were playing with it but we started to show it to some people and it was really really cool they'd come and play it and people started filling in all of the missing parts i didn't play that video with audio but people started coming and you know adding and they'd make their own sound effects and they'd come and you know push and and you know everything that wasn't there from this prototype that we had built in a week people could imagine it and they could see the potential and we also started to meet a bunch of people from the studio who came up and said hey i could help make this a reality you know i i don't you know but i have a background in x you know people that had worked in

industrial design uh there's one guy in particular that we met named vlad and uh vlad came up to me at the company barbecue and uh he has a very kind of blunt way of speaking many times and and vlad came up and basically said you're doing this all wrong this is horrible i can fix it and he said i have to show you something and so we went to see and vlad had built uh scratch built this custom drone with like head tracked cameras and you know a crazy thing and like this is scratch built down to like his own chemically etched circuit boards and things and he was like i know how to do this i know how to do this stuff uh it's a shame the video that i had cut off there the uh this drone had like vertical takeoff and then would rotate and turn into an airfoil and fly like a jet and it was really cool uh so vlad came on board

and you know started redoing everything that we had you know stumbled our way through for this prototype and you know other people on the team started you know all of these skill sets started coming out people that worked with industrial design and and at the time we had this idea of building a custom game controller uh for the thing that that's how we would interface with the toys and and uh you know kind of a flight stick idea and so we started working and this was the next prototype that we had built so you know still pretty rudimentary it was heavy it was big it was clunky but it was a major step up from our kind of building block and copper wire thing it was much sturdier it used uh micro usb connectors to connect everything uh which you know usbc just can't come fast enough uh i absolutely despise those connectors but they worked and they got the data across the thing

you know you could play it and you know we we knew who we were making this game for and i'll never forget the moment that we brought in the first group of kids and we gave them this thing to play with and just you know the looks on their faces their eyes light up lit up their jaws dropped and and this was a rough you know this was a very rudimentary prototype it was heavy it was clunky um but you could just see this magic uh that it was something that they absolutely fell in love with and so we knew we were on to something special and and we took this game and we brought it to uh ubisoft's hq in paris and we presented it uh and went super well and we're really happy the the pitch went well they were excited and we showed a little bit of all these crazy prototypes and things we'd built but

we got a green light and so that moves us into the next phase of our story which is pre-production so coming back from our successful pitch we were feeling great we started to grow the team expand the team bring people on um and we were feeling amazing on top of the world we were like this is it we're kicking ass we threw out all of the old process we you know did this crazy new experiment it was super successful uh so we felt vindicated for you know trying to do things differently and we were incredibly over ambitious super audacious we were like we're gonna do everything at this point just you know who thought we could do anything to do with hardware uh this will be awesome just just throw more crazy throw more crazy stuff on the pile and you know but we still knew that we were a new team we're a small team and we needed to prove ourselves so we set about making a vertical slice you know we fully recognized that the little

demo that we showed um to kids you know that was never something that could have shipped it was you know a hacky kind of little demo that made something work so we set out to prove that we could do this for real we could make a game and make a toy uh that looked and felt like something that could go to market and so you know filled with energy filled with enthusiasm we we charged into this and uh started going pretty well uh this is our next iteration those are the connectors so we got rid of those horrible micro usb connectors and we made these really neat connectors that would click together and they'd work and uh you know have this really instantaneous connection to the game and you know we made our first real toys uh these are some of the early uh you know the first version of real looking toys that we made we started to bring on some people from the toy industry that knew what they were doing uh we started working with model shops and and people that could you know really make proper professional toy

prototypes and we made these toys they looked really cool uh you know they had problems they're certainly usability things uh i have gained an immense amount of respect for toy designers and toy industry and everything that they do and so you know you'd move these toys and the wings you know would kind of fall off because these connectors were great but uh didn't really have anything that would latch or connect and we built a demo um this was our first vertical slice demo and you know it was it was really coming together it was something that was a big step forward from you know the little prototypes that we had made it was pretty neat you'd start out in space kind of take off from this mothership and uh eventually launch and you know then you'd arrive out in space and there was kind of these different levels that you could select uh down on the planet surface these different linear levels and you could look at one of these gates and say like oh i want to do that and then you transition down to the uh

the surface there was a loading sequence and uh you'd engage on whatever mission it was so in this example it was a race and uh you know you'd go and start engaging that it was pretty cool and everything that you do on the toy would be you know instantly recreated and you could add all these weapons or boosters or things uh that could change the gameplay and so we made this demo we're feeling great we're like on top of the world kicking ass uh we bring it back and we're like okay here's where we're at this is our vertical slice it's awesome and you know that's when we realized okay this is starting to get real like we're playing in a bit of a different league there's real money on the table this is you know we're building a bigger team here um the stakes are a lot higher and the expectations are a lot higher uh it's no longer good enough just to have you know something that's a cool idea compelling demo and you know we start hearing all of this feedback of like really you know you guys making a custom controller like do you know how long microsoft and sony and nintendo spend on making controller like that's a pretty big endeavor and uh you know the

engine that you're working with i'm not sure you're gonna ship with that and and the game structure and and player engagement and you know play time and world logic and all these things that you need to figure out for building a new ip uh you know really real valid things that we were just kind of rushing through with vim and vigor but in addition to all of these external things we started having these voices cropping up within our team saying hey guys i think maybe we should take a step back and and kind of plan this out properly and and figure out what our scope is and and uh you know this process is cool but it's a bit chaotic like this is a bit seed of our pants right we should really document this do all of this and at this point we had two paths ahead of us we had a big choice we could thoroughly document you know scope it out

rigorous process analyze requests this is how you know ubisoft has proven these processes out this is how we make games um you know people have figured this out we've got jira and confluence and yeah we can like really button this down you have to remember that this group of people making this thing kind of all pulled together specifically to rebel against this kind of process right it was kind of a group of people that were specifically like ah you know to us this was the the boring and slow but you know maybe sensible but boring and slow path that you know that we wanted to go away from and so to us we saw another choice more innovation no matter what challenge came up we could always solve it with more innovation and there's two guys that i wished i had paid more attention to uh in retrospect names are abraham maslow and wilfredo peretto does anyone

know what maslow is uh what i'm referring to in this case hierarchy of needs um no not the hierarchy of needs he is very famous for the hierarchy of needs uh but not that thank you for playing into my gdc presentation thing uh specifically uh i am talking about uh maslow's hammer or the expression that when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail and vilfredo pareto is famous for the pareto principle or the 80 20 rule the principle that 20 of the effort will yield 80 of the results and that final eighty percent or twenty percent of the results that you need actually comes from eighty percent of the effort because we had a hammer and that hammer was more renovation the whole process that we had created was effectively an innovation machine and so no matter what feedback came up

no matter what challenge came up uh we could innervate our way out of that problem so you know too expensive and difficult to create a custom game controller no problem we'll make a controller mount that interfaces directly with the extension port of all of the first party controller controllers allowing you to communicate you know instantly through their uh hardware and leveraging all of that work in a way that no one's done before more powerful tech no problem we'll take ubisoft's latest and greatest engine uh snowdrop and port everything over and uh you know leverage uh that work with an engine that uh is amazingly powerful but you know at the time hadn't really been fully proven out and was still being used on the division more freedom and autonomy no problem we'll create tech to allow you to seamlessly travel from space to planets planets to space circumnavigate around worlds in a completely open and seamless manner

more meaningful choices no problem we'll simulate every single ai on every single planet simultaneously allowing the players to have real impact on the planets uh and allowing the enemy to fight back so that you know no two players will have the same story and everyone's game will go in a different direction and you know we didn't stop there no matter what came up uh there was something new we had crazy three-dimensional elemental propagation throughout the game we had second screen experiences and uh planet creation at some point ill advise uh we wanted to build laser tag into the toy i still kind of missed this idea it would have been really cool um but but we were really going out there and we made all of this stuff and we took a step back and we're like okay where are we at it

worked these were cool prototypes they were amazing ideas like they and they worked do we you know we had this team that could make these crazy innovations functional and prove them out quickly and and except for the other 80 of the work that it would have taken to actually make those features right we had quickly gotten them to these 80 states of like yeah yeah that that's cool that works and when we started to take a step back and look at it we were like oh no we made a huge mistake and i'm not quite sure how all of these separate pieces were supposed to fit together you know individually they were all really neat innovations but they weren't adding up to create a sum that was greater than a hole that was greater than some of its parts and so you know we started to realize okay you know this process that was amazing for conception that was incredibly effective during the conception phase i don't know if this is scaling in the way

that we hoped it would and you know while there were some of these features that were really groundbreaking and revolutionary and are still huge components of the game today you know this controller mount right at your fingertips instantly swapping out and the seamless travel and this incredible living world uh so many more of the features you know ended up having to be cut uh and cast aside and you know we wasted a lot of time and effort uh trying to innovate our way out of every problem which we could have solved in a much better manner and for me you know this was really a moment uh stepping back and it was kind of this shattering of of the reality distortion field uh engineers at apple used to speak about something they called the reality distortion field where the charisma of steve jobs could convince people that the impossible was possible

and that you know no matter what problem they faced even when the you know you couldn't push the silicon to do that uh he could will it to happen and they would pull a group of people together and and make it so and you know honestly in the early phases of this project we felt like that we felt like okay you know no matter what happens we've got this process it's working we will just will it to to make it so make it happen and you know was when we stood back and looked at this and said okay we're never going to ship this it's not going to come together uh you know for me this was really this kind of low point of reflection and that brought us right into the beginning of production with this question how in the hell are we going to ship this how are we going to make this you know how are we going to fix this process we had all of these incredibly powerful and compelling parts how are we going to pull them

together into a hole a little voice we could solve it with more innovation we kind of realized you know maybe maybe not maybe that was in fact part of the problem that had gotten into this uh gotten us into the situation in ed catmull's excellent book creativity inc he talks about the importance of balance and the importance of conflict between all of the departments in a creative enterprise to maintain that balance and when we took a step back and looked we realized that our development was you know horribly unbalanced and i want to clarify that this was not uh specific disciplines fighting against each other this was not you know game designers wanting innovation and programmers uh saying no you know this was really guiding philosophies and we had game

designers pushing for uh you know more scope control and and bringing things down to a more elegant solution we had programmers pushing for more innovation you know these were these kind of competing philosophies but what we realized was that the philosophy of innovation as solution was massively uh unbalanced and overweighted and we had to take a step back and some of those voices that had been there within our team earlier um we had to put things in place uh to empower those voices and listen to those voices you know people in tech saying okay hey it's great that we have these wonderful innovations but we need to balance that out with safer solutions with proven solutions in order to protect the innovations and make them really sing people in production saying hey we can help make this scope more manageable we can help address the timeline and adjust the timeline to make this a realistic endeavor in business saying you know we can help

validate this offer we can help validate which parts of this are really resonating uh really pinpoint uh the audience and their expectations every gdc talk has to have some sort of cheesy analogy so this is mine uh i think of this as uh trying to protect a a spark protect a flame and grow it into a fire and early on too much process and too much innovation and too much structure can snuff that out can can you know really [Music] squander and and kill ideas uh way too early uh and uh again in creativity inc you know he talks about uh talks about protecting ugly babies that you know often these early prototypes that you're making with a couple people in a couple days they're rough they're rough around the edges and if people looked at them you know they'd be easy to dissect and they'd be easy to pick apart and you need to give that time and space and freedom to survive but what we realized

is as you grow without the structure without the protection of that structure starting to come on board you're actually doing an immense disservice to these sparks new flames will spark up and and consume all the oxygen winds of change will come uh as as you know things change in the industry or things change with people's behavior and you know start to snuff out uh things that we're promising and you have to start putting these walls starting to put this structure in place bit by bit leading up to protect the innovations that you have and that equilibrium point that point of balance is not always the same it is not always that you want an even balance between all of these different departments but that balance and that equilibrium point shifts over the course of production and you need to carefully maintain that and nurture that to help that spark grow into the kind of roaring flame that you wanted to be

and really for me looking back that's my key takeaway in conception we had a very unbalanced process massively weighted towards you know innovation and protecting innovation and making that uh innovation as rapid and as effective as it could be and it was incredibly effective uh and i can't stress that enough this is a process i would love to see other companies and other groups replicate uh because it was some of the most fulfilling uh game development experience i've ever had in my career and and many people on the team i think would attest to that and we've you know already started to see some experiments replicating that elsewhere and it's been incredibly effective but moving into pre-production we made the mistake of you know just trying to keep going trying to scale that process up and we should have you know still kept that that balance on the side of innovation it's still important to add that depth but we had to start to tip the scales we

had to start to add some of that structure uh to make it work and then you know moving into production uh we had to find our new equilibrium point our new balance point and that's going to look different for everyone you know the path to get there uh and the path to adjust that new equilibrium for us uh it meant really creating the structure of having regular venues for healthy conflict uh for you know venues where people could challenge so you know we had creative briefs with a feature at an early level so kind of a high level presentation overview of the feature bringing in all the stakeholders who could say okay you know i i want to raise a flag about this this is a warning you know then taking that into fsos this is very ubisoft specific thing but essentially a much much more specific description of that feature again with a forum for challenge and debate discussion um our meetings you know became very

much about making sure that anyone could add points for discussion they weren't just you know top down me saying here's the agenda we built the agenda collaboratively and we made sure that there were venues for everyone to discuss and argue and we encouraged that healthy conflict on the production side we really shifted focus to velocity to better understand how we were tracking towards our scope uh we used play test and external validation to understand our audience and and what's resonating and we really refocused in on our game pillars in order to use those as the razor to help prioritize and focus on what's important and we realized that only through focusing on these things could we protect these things and actually make them flourish in the game for us those pillars were of course this modular toy you know this instant connection uh this magical moment that makes kids eyes light up and their jaws drop

the creative combat that this instant swapping and connection empowers you to do in-game uh this creative problem solving where you get into a challenge and there's no right or wrong answer but you have to experiment and figure out how to adapt to take on that challenge and this incredible living dynamic world that you know makes it for no two players having the same story no two players having the same journey now we're still active in development uh and i need to give a huge shout out to our team back in toronto who are still working very very hard to bring everything uh completely together and wrap it up i'm super super excited about the game i'm super excited for you all to see more about it over the coming months i can't wait uh so far we've only given a little glimpse at e3 and i can't wait for people to see what we've been up to and you know i'd really uh

stress two things one i would love uh to see other people uh take advantage of the lessons that we learned in that incredibly uh effective conception process and and you know process that was inspired uh from game jam culture from game drum processes that we adapted and to keep an eye on that balance between structure and uh and innovation in order to help uh get through all of those phases of production thank you very much send my presentation now i think we've got time for a couple questions um first i want to stress please please please uh this is my first gdc presentation um and i would really really love it and appreciate it if you would go once you get the email if you go and fill in the feedback form because i would love the feedback love

your thoughts any questions there are two microphones there and there hi for so in the conception phase you had this two-week period that ended with three pitches yep how many pitches did you actually end up making uh so the conception phase uh i need to you're asking me to do math um okay so first of all uh the first week ended in three pitches per person so that changed as our team scaled up so pitch-wise you know initially i guess we were doing 24 pitches every two weeks but our team started growing as we were as we're expanding so you know by the time we got to our our actual uh green light pitch uh many you know over a hundred fleshed out more than that i don't know 150 tons and tons and tons of game pitches uh there's really like a treasure trove there i'd love to go back to them we built three prototypes every two

weeks uh so you know that math should be a little bit easier uh so again doing math uh i think all in all we probably had i don't know 15 16 different uh prototypes that's not divisible by three so it's almost not the real number but somewhere in that ballpark hi thanks for the presentation you're welcome um so uh i'm wondering if during the process where you were pairing people up or putting them into the groups of four did it really matter uh what disciplines you paired together or did you mix that up every time um so this is one of the areas where we actually james and i actually put some design and thought into that we would make sure to rotate so that people weren't paired up with the same people obviously we'd have a chance to to go through but we would try to pair people up where one of the things we were most conscious of was

one person steering or dominating that conversation too much so we would try to pair more introverted or quieter people together in some cases especially early on in the project and you know more extroverted allowed people together who could play off each other's energies that changed over the course of our production because as everyone started prototyping together working very close in these intense things building pitching everyone became much more comfortable working with each other and you know towards the end we had to be far less concerned about that and you know we were able to just rotate through people that hadn't worked together yet thanks um and also i noticed you had some like ar pitches during the process sure was there ever an ar version of this game you know you see the keyboard placement stuff that would be awesome no but it would be awesome uh just a small logistical question because i also make games that are designed for kids uh how

did you find the kids for play testing i've googled this repeatedly and i think the only result is i'm probably on some watch lists uh we work with a wonderful uh user research team uh at ubisoft at ubisoft toronto so i feel quite lucky to have a bunch of experts that can help guide us through that um we've done a lot of play testing with kids and we continue to do regular play testing with kids i think it is wonderful to see really raw unfiltered thoughts and reactions um sometimes we ask people for scores on play tests of like what do you think of the game one to five and uh we found kids are useless at giving scores um they are wonderful to learn usability lessons they're wonderful to you know actually watch their reactions and see but you know we've had some play tests where you know the build is broken and there's some horrible glitch and you just see this kid banging their head against a problem and not understanding it and like they look like they're gonna

start crying and then we're like what do you think of the game they're like five out of five it was amazing we're like okay you're just excited because you're coming to test the video game so you have to be a little uh skeptical and you know take any scores with a grain of salt but i think there's immense value there's always immense value in watching people from whatever target demo your game is targeting really play your game it's a very very humbling experience cool thanks with the amount of ideas that you were asking your team to come up with during the brainstorming phase did you run into a lot of creative burnout and if so how did you manage that uh it's a great question um it is a it's a really intense process um you know the the mental drain that you get from you know you are really pushing yourself to go to the end of like whatever the heck you know after a week of doing this and generating these pitches and giving these pitches uh you know many people on our team you know was cross-disciplined many people

weren't that comfortable going up and presenting and that was a draining uh process the key for us was that weekend you know the key for us and that's a big part of why we split it up like that was having that first week super intense all these ideas are coming out uh you'd pitch on thursday which was good because you know that gave you a bit more time you'd pitch on thursday come in on friday okay pressure's off a little bit you're not generating ideas now you're sitting with a team you're trying to figure out how the heck can we prototype this um but that's more about people leveraging their experience their skill sets saying oh i know how to do this i could do that i could you know it's very fun it's very engaging but then having that weekend to just go let things simmer in your head for a bit calm down and then be ready to go the next week with intense brainstorming uh you know it's kind of like participating in a game jam uh but you need those gaps you need those breaks in between all right thanks hey you're welcome uh knowing how well your small prototyping group worked would you

say there's still value in doing studio-wide game jams um so we've also experimented with studio-wide game gems at both at ub toronto and other studios that i've been at i think they are um very very fun i think they're a great retention tool i think they're you know something very motivating for employees i think one of the challenges is um they don't necessarily have the right venue to turn into something real to turn into something that you can really leverage uh there's companies that have done that really well i know bethesda you know they they tend to do game gems of how could you add a feature onto our existing game but typically the the constraints of a game jam you know where you're doing everything in a week or you're doing everything in two days limits you to creating kind of little arcadey mini games which are super fun but isn't necessarily something that ubisoft is going to be like or big companies can be like yes we're going to take that and like publish it um so you know what we were attempting to do was

you know scale that up to something that it could be used really in a major conception of a game i think that was really effective and you know personally i love the idea of maybe uh often you have downtime as people are ramping down from one project before they start another that's a wonderful time to try something like this with the hope that it can actually turn into a commercial product that the company could do thank you welcome hello so two questions the first one is about the 25 ids how deep are always the ideas is it just a simple gameplay mechanics or how do you really define so typically people were trying to make uh ideas that a game could be built around so a little bit bigger um you know not just like well you could press a to do this but more like oh you could build a game around this mechanic that having been said the ideas themselves were just you know a sentence or two short descriptions um at that level and you're going through so the description was very very short but the ideas were designed to be

something that you could actually build a triple a game okay and the second one was um how who decided the the idea of the brainstorm of the of the two weeks when you said uh like we will think about the game i don't remember the the example yes yes the where is the guided questions who decided who decided on those questions yes uh so that's one of the areas where we were uh less democratic as well uh that was really just uh uh james and i two leads on the project we would sit together and and kind of try to come up with some some ideas and put that out to the group yeah thank you all so so much uh for coming and listening to talk please rate it or give me the feedback or whatever the email asks you to do thank you

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