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Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag

Ubisoft, Singapore
Position: Art director / Technical art director

AC4 was a massive project, spread out over several Ubi studios. We estimate that it was touched by over 900 people, by the time it shipped. The Singapore studio owned most of the sea-related content - caves, shipwrecks, forts, and of course, the ships themselves.

We used to joke that AC4 was really a game about a pirate, who occasionally went on shore to kill people...

Exploring underwater:

One of the major areas we tackled was exploring the underwater shipwrecks.

We had initially created it as a very tense, scary segment where the player felt real pressure from the constant threat of running out of air. However, after building it out people were enchanted by the beauty of the colorful carribean sea... so we removed the sense of urgency, allowing people to explore and experiment. (Though we did add sharks...)

Attacking the forts:

Capturing the various forts became a key element in unlocking the world. Initially most of the destruction was created with real-time physics... till we found that could slow the console to a crawl. Eventually we had to bake most of the animations when sections of the forts would explode.

The Ships:

Of course, you can't have a glorious pirate game without beautiful ships.

Due to their importance and complexity, we were rebuilding, tuning and optimizing the ship models for pretty much the entire project. Finding the right balance of complexity and playability took a lot of time and work.

The smugglers' dens:

Each smugglers' den was pretty much a unique endevour. Hidden away in caves, only accessible by sea... very cool stuff.