In a company that has over 500 employees, things can feel impersonal; your voice can be lost in the crowd, it can feel stifling and isolated. Yoan Fanise, a Creative Director and the former Content & Audio Director at Ubisoft, knows this all to well and it is one of the reasons he has decided to leave Ubisoft after 14 years.
Fanise has worked on Beyond Good & Evil, Assassin's Creed and was the Content Director on Valiant Hearts. Making the decision to remove himself from Ubisoft wasn't easy; after 14 years the studio and its employees had become "a family" to him. While he is proud of his accomplishments, there was a huge contrast between working on a game with a team of 30+ (as they did for Beyond Good & Evil) and a team that constantly grows to meet AAA requirements.
With a smaller team game development is more intimate, the strength in the diversity of the team is met with "unique, creative moods":
The more we grew, the more this mood diminished. 100, 250, 500 people…it was necessary due to the technical evolution and AAA requirements, but on the creative and human side something was missing…
I mean the industrial scale and organization of a giant project like Assassin's Creed removes some direct connection between people from different job categories, for example. Your interactions are limited, and it is really difficult to have a global vision of the finished game.
After Assassin's Creed's development was wrapped up Fanise took a team and worked on Valiant Hearts the way he had worked on Beyond Good & Evil. The entire team was involved on the script, level design and game design. Regardless of the fact that the team for Valiant Hearts had been smaller, the game experienced great success — a success that came as a double edged sword.
The game, holding the Ubisoft stamp-of-approval, was similar to "a successful chain of restaurants allows some of its cooks to install a foodtruck on the parking lot, then asks them to go back inside."
What does that mean for Fanise? Leave the company and have his own "food truck" without the chain restaurant overlord.
Why not go real indie after have been called “fake indie” during my 2 years on Valiant Hearts?
