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Project

Assassin's Creed Nexus

Virtual Reality

Assassin's Creed Nexus

In 2021, I was head hunted by Ubisoft to join to the team at Reflections to work on their first ever AAA mobile VR game: Assassin's Creed Nexus which went on to win multiple awards as a ground breaking title, being one of the first AAA IP's available on the Meta Quest headset.

During my time on Nexus I worked on various aspects of development, including:

- Tooling. I worked on multiple tools to help speed up development and automate time consuming workflows, including a grid based system to handle batching of assets based on type, size and other data

- Performance. By regularly reviewing performance, in terms of both frame rate and memory usage, and keeping in touch with various teams such as Environment Art, I co-ordinated the optimisation of some of the largest and most troublesome worlds in the game. I also worked with Level Design and Technical Level Design to ensure we stayed in budget with regard to NPC counts, and rebalanced any loads/unloads as and when necessary

- Quality. Performance and quality was a difficult balancing act on this platform, with such an ambitious game. Having a thorough knowledge of the various worlds and working methods helped find opportunities to increase visual quality. I was able to redeploy tooling initially designed for other purposes, in a more creative way that increased visual quality, and came with a minimal memory foot print increase, if any at all, when compared to the previous solution. The vista in Venice is a good example.

- Bugs. Occasionally a run time bug would pop up with Tech Art or adjacent systems. My knowledge of Unity's built in systems, combined with my background in C# programming enabled me to swiftly fix these.

- Unity Concepts. I introduced common Unity workflows that were not being utilised on the project. In doing so, I was able to eliminate the issue of being unable to identify and therefore validate assets

- Validators. I contributed a number of validators to the project that could be used to identify assets with issues including things such as checking UV sets, import options, LOD setup and other things of that nature

- Responsive. By keeping in close contact with Environment Art, I was always available to provide insight into any aspect of the game world's current state and where it was heading. Additional tooling was provided as requested, improving the speed and effectiveness of the Environment Art team.

- Day to day helper tools. During my day to day it was common to face certain issues with certain worlds. To remedy the issue, I wrote a number of tools to quickly help me identify issues such as bad data setup that would ultimately lead to memory issues.

- Testing. With a background in the XR space, I am no stranger to installing projects to devices to observe and profile them. I would do this regularly, keeping a map or trouble areas and a keen eye on any memory issues, and finding areas where there may be room for optimisation, or if it was the case, where there could be space for improvement in visual quality. I would then feed this back to the Environment Art team.

- Support. My background working with Unity enabled me to provide support to multiple team members across the project, as well as more focused support for the Environment Art team. Team members knew they could reach out to me at any time and I would provide any assistance I could at the earliest opportunity.

AC Nexus was released in November 2023, and is now available on the Meta Quest store.