Ubisoft Reflections Training Days

A group of us did 2 days of training with Mark Sample, a game director/producer with Ubisoft Reflections at the Tyneside Cinema. He showed us the basics of how the concept for a game is created, how the characters will develop, how the story will unfold.

During the training days we did brainstorming for a number of different game ideas whilst under a number of restraints and game specification. In the end we had ideas for both app based games and online purchase games.

Our app based game or “crisp packet treasure hunt” as we called it was based on the Google app Goggles which allows you to search the internet using pictures you have taken. The basic idea was to go on a treasure hunt to find generic objects from a list, such as a packet of Ready Salted Crisps and take a picture of it.

The online purchase game we decided to design was based around stealth as we thought that this would fill a gap in the market. We designed multiple levels for it and multiple characters. However after only a couple of hours we realised how much work would be required to develop a fully fledged AAA game. After about an hour we were told that we had to pitch our game to Mark. This helped us see what it was like to have a sudden deadline.

These training days were probably the most interesting experience so far of the Gold Arts Award.