Seven Ubisoft studios combined efforts to bring to the life the world of Assassin’s Creed IV. For our fifth making-of update we join Producer Martin Schelling who was very much at the helm.
Jean-Sebastien: “At the beginning we defined the vision and the scope; the size of the gameand the mechanics. By now Assassin’s Creed is a well tuned production, the Singapore studio has worked with us since Assassin’s Creed II. They started with a small mandate: the linear missions in ACII. We developed our system of communication to share visions and review progress, until they could take on more and more. And so, by ACIII, they surprised a lot of people with the naval scenes.
“When we came to develop Black Flag with its piracy theme, having the first steps made in the naval direction coming from Singapore was something that we kept in mind.
“The first thing is, ‘what is the recipe?’ Then you approach the studios, for example Sofia in Bulgaria has a lot of engineers. We configure our mandates in order to to get maxium benefit from the talents of our employees and their available resources. There’s a dedicated team in Montreal that makes sure that communication is well spread – every piece of feedback, review and decision. They are our Strike Team [laughs]. It’s really like a big orchestra that has to play the same melody.”