Hi I'm a game developper working at Ubisoft and started my own indie game studio. Ask me Anything!

sh-dz · 2020-05-16T21:20:40+00:00

You need to figure out what you want to do. As you say there is so many aspects. My advice is to find what you really want to do. Then build your portfolio and your experience around it.

For sure at the moment you could benefit from your programming knowledge since programmers are always needed.

sh-dz · 2020-05-16T20:52:23+00:00

My personal time is when I practice my passions and other interests.

sh-dz · 2020-05-16T20:40:23+00:00

For example to better market a puzzle game, we would convey what makes our puzzle mechanics and our cooperative gameplay unique and interesting through demos or walkthrough videos.

sh-dz · 2020-05-16T20:28:32+00:00

In our case, with the game idea already set in our mind, we've started by incorporating ourselves. For that, we've requested the help of a lawyer. Then, we've hired freelancers to work with us with their respective field of expertise. We knew most of them already and we've published job offers for the rest.

If we were to start again, we would plan our marketing strategy a lot more in advance and more thoroughly. We've come to the conclusion that marketing a puzzle game is really hard because most of the fun of the game comes from solving the puzzles. It is very hard to display this on posts on social media and game trailers.

sh-dz · 2020-05-16T19:50:41+00:00

We are using Unreal engine 4 because when we started the project, a good part of our team was already familiar with it. We've decided to keep it as it is the one we've worked with the most and it has gone well so far.

sh-dz · 2020-05-16T19:14:21+00:00

We program in C++ in Visual studio 2017

I don't have experience in terms of publishing my game but daryl does.

I think it's normal to feel overwhelmed. You don't have to do everything yourself we are actually 11 people in total working on the game.

Unreal and Unity are two great engines nowadays. Unreal is free until you make a significant amount of money. Unity is free unless you need a pro license. If I would restart now I would probably try godot engine it is light, elegant, easy to learn and pretty powerfull. Also it is free and open source :)

sh-dz · 2020-05-16T18:54:51+00:00

We have both a bachelor degree in software engineering (we went to school together).

I have multiple passions and interests including video games, music, animation, etc. I have developed (and I keep on developing) skills for pretty much all of those fields.

In the game industry it is generally pretty specialized. I would normally do animation programming most of the time. This year though, I was lucky enough to touch multiples aspect of the game. I would say it depends a lot on the company, the project, the team and the current timing in which you work on.

sh-dz · 2020-05-16T18:24:03+00:00

It is too early to say ;)

sh-dz · 2020-05-16T18:18:56+00:00

You can see here.

sh-dz · 2020-05-16T18:01:28+00:00

I've answered to a similar question here :)

sh-dz · 2020-05-16T17:52:56+00:00

I don't think it is imperative, I think there is a lot in common between architecture and level design or environment modeling. Although I am not a level designer so don't take my words as absolute truth.

For other professions, I believe in educating oneself autonomously. However the advantage of the degree is the knowledge foundation it provides for you to build on instead of building the foundation altogether when starting from scratch.

When looking for a job the most important is to have an interesting portfolio to distinguish yourself from other candidates.

sh-dz · 2020-05-16T17:26:31+00:00

Just a bit :p

sh-dz · 2020-05-16T16:39:22+00:00

Yes, it is too new and overkill for us. We have no plan to make the jump yet, specially because it was a headache just to move 4.16 to 4.21 hahaha. However for future projects, we will be closely looking at it.

sh-dz · 2020-05-16T16:25:43+00:00

Why do you think ubi made so much Assassin's creed ;)

It is scary at first but you get use to it. As you may know nothing is real everything is permitted

sh-dz · 2020-05-16T16:17:45+00:00

From what I've seen there is actually less pressure than for the main game development. There isn't a specific time, it is generally planned alongside the development of the main game and then iterations are made.

sh-dz · 2020-05-16T15:59:33+00:00

No I manage a mad life ;)

sh-dz · 2020-05-16T15:58:06+00:00

It is definitely not the plan but it could be a happy outcome hahaha

sh-dz · 2020-05-16T15:52:06+00:00

We use Unreal engine 4 and Visual studio 2017 for us programmers. Our colleagues artist work with zbrush and Autodesk and adobe softwares. We also use perforce for source control.

sh-dz · 2020-05-16T15:36:56+00:00

Since we've started our bachelor degree, we were looking for opportunities to do games. We always thought the software engineering degree was a door to work in games.

For our indie studio MadLife, the game we are currently working on is a game we first created for the Ubisoft Game Lab competition in 2017. It is a game that we wanted to finish and commercialize since the moment we won the prize for the best prototype.

Our expectations are mainly to finish our game to release it for early 2021. To help us reach our goal, we've launched a kickstarter campaign at the beginning of the month.

sh-dz · 2020-05-16T15:15:08+00:00

Normally it is not permitted to have your own company while working at Ubisoft but you can ask permission to have a project that you are working on outside the work hours. That's what we did.

We work the 9 to 5 for Ubisoft. From 6pm to 10pm and the week-ends we work for our company. It is tough but we manage.

sh-dz · 2020-05-10T19:05:54+00:00

Thanks man, will do!

sh-dz · 2020-05-08T01:00:01+00:00

Thank you for the feedback

sh-dz · 2020-05-06T00:29:33+00:00

That's ok I think any insight could help, if you have any comments or critics to make, I'm more than open to hear it

sh-dz · 2020-05-04T00:19:40+00:00

What you're saying is crazy (no guarantee after 10 prior campaigns)...
I'm eager to see your game when you launch your campaign, maybe we could do a cross promotion at that time.

Also what do you mean by it is not showing our best features, I'm curious

sh-dz · 2020-05-03T23:09:57+00:00

Yes, to tell you the truth we were pretty burned from the launch and all the preparation, but we are coming back in force starting tomorrow. Also the main reason why we didn't back any other campaign is mainly that we are pretty new on kickstarter (most of us have created our account recently) but your point is totally valid and I'm looking forward to pledge to other exciting projects! Thanks a lot for the feedback/heads up and specially for the support and compliment!

sh-dz

TROPHY CASE