Ubisoft’s creative director Clint Hocking, who’s shipped games include Splinter Cell, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Far Cry 2, announced that he’s leaving the company after spending nine years with its Montreal studio.

Hocking did not specify whether he already has plans to join another developer or whether he intends to continue working in the game industry, but he expressed a need to avoid the bad habits that he believes are inevitable whenever he finds himself comfortable and content with his station in life.

"In the 451 weeks that I have been here, I have adopted many new habits," Hocking explains in a post on his personal blog. "It has taken tremendous effort to prevent those habits from atrophying into bad ones. Pride burns into hubris. Willingness wilts into desperation. Confidence slows to stubbornness. Passion boils into anger."

He adds, "Each of these faults and others – without care and constant self-examination – risk becoming habits. I am too comfortable. I am too content. And I know where that can lead for me. Fortunately, for the first time in my life, I know the way forward."

Though the creative director has shipped only three titles during his nine years at the company, he points out that those releases have sold a total of more than 12 million copies and have each received an average Metacritic score of over 90 percent. "I’ve been very lucky to say the least," he admits.

Good luck Clint!

Media in Canada reports that Ubisoft Montreal teamed up with Microsoft to promote the Visual Studio development software through ads embedded in Far Cry 2.

Ads in the game lead players to a "secret section" of the Canadian version of the Far Cry 2 website. There they will be invited to download trial version of Visual Studio and read deverlopers’ diaries on how they used the software.

Jean-Francois Lévesque is a game play programmer at Ubisoft Montreal, who worked extremely hard to be where he is today.

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We exchanged a few emails. I asked him about his experiences in climbing up the industry ladder. I knew Lévesque had been featured on sister site Gamasutra for the remarkable work he and artist Matthias Baillet did on Far Cry 2’s fire system. What I didn’t know was how he got to that stage.

In this interview, Lévesque talks about his path from working in telecommunications in a remote Canadian village, to feeling prepared to apply for a big video game job in Montreal. He shares some of the details of his job interviews, both the good and the bad, as well as the programming projects he worked on to make himself qualified to apply for those jobs in the first place.

Keynote speaker Clint Hocking: “Today I’m going to talk about the future of game design”

February 10, 2009 – Vancouver, BC – Game Design Expo 2009 saw game industry professionals and enthusiasts from across North America converge in Vancouver, BC for a sold-out weekend of lively talks and panel discussions. The third annual expo – which has quickly cemented itself as a major event on the industry’s calendar – took place on February 7 and 8 at Vancity Theatre at the Vancouver International Film Centre, and at the Game Design campus of Vancouver Film School (VFS), Canada’s premier post-secondary entertainment arts institution.

Keynote speaker Clint Hocking, Creative Director at Ubisoft Montreal (Splinter Cell , Far Cry 2 ), gave the packed house an exhilarating start to Saturday’s Industry Speaker Day. His ambitious and provocative presentation, “The Next Generation of Player”, set the tone for the rest of the day’s exciting lineup, which also featured presentations by designers and producers from companies like Epic, Insomniac, Microsoft, and Radical.

Hocking led the audience through a rapid-fire rundown of game console history, up to an impending “massive demographic shift” in 2015, and asked the question that should be on every game designer’s mind: Who is Generation Y, and why should we care? “Today, I’m not going to talk about the formal aspects of game design,” he explained. “Today, I’m going to talk about the future of game design.”

Hocking’s keynote kicked off a day that ran the gamut from far-reaching explorations of how games are designed and played to behind-the-scenes looks at hit titles like Gears of War (Epic senior animator Scott Dossett) and Resistance 2 (Insomniac lead designer Drew Murray). A panel featuring a number of industry luminaries closed out the day, beginning as a discussion of Pre-Production, Prototyping, and Pitching, but hitting upon even more fascinating topics, as moderator Victor Lucas (Electric Playground) led the group through a wide-ranging and spirited discussion on sequels, the future of the industry, and the economy’s impact on game development.

On the event’s second day, VFS’s Game Design campus opened its doors to more than 400 registrants in a free, day-long Open House. Aspiring game designers and their families were treated to a hands-on slate of sample classes, interactive gameplay, and exclusive industry presentations. A Women in Games panel was an especially big draw, as it delved into one of the biggest challenges facing the industry today. The panel members were enthusiastic about the continued increase in the number of women working in the game industry, and discussed what they enjoyed most about their game careers. “It can be ridiculously hard but ridiculously rewarding,” concluded panelist and Electronic Arts game designer, Tara Mustapha.

This year’s event culminated in the exclusive announcement of Vancouver Film School’s first-ever $30,000 Women in Games Scholarship, which covers one aspiring female game designer’s  full tuition to VFS’s acclaimed one-year Game Design program. Details on six other scholarships, ranging in value from $2,500 to $7,000 and sponsored by G4techTV, EA, Big Fish Games, Annex Pro, Obsidian Entertainment, and Radical Entertainment, were also revealed.

Visit gamedesignexpo.com in the coming days for a full wrap-up and photo highlights of this year’s event.

VFS is proud to partner with the following event sponsors in making Game Design Expo a hit in 2009: G4techTV, EA, Ubisoft, Annex Pro, Big Fish Games, Obsidian Entertainment, Radical Entertainment, The Georgia Straight, Biz Books, Vancouver ACM SIGGRAPH, Women in Games International, Vancouver, and TechVibes.

About Game Design Expo

Game Design Expo is an annual event for game industry professionals and enthusiasts hosted by Vancouver Film School’s Game Design program. Since the inaugural event in 2007 and continuing through the sold-out 2008 and 2009 weekends, Game Design Expo has played host to such industry luminaries as Don Daglow, Ron Gilbert, Eric Zimmerman, Clint Hocking, Ellen Guon Beeman, and Kelly Zmak, and creative leaders from companies like Bungie, Activision, EA, BioWare, LucasArts, and Crystal Dynamics/Eidos.

gamedesignexpo.com

About Game Design at Vancouver Film School

Students in the one-year Game Design program at Vancouver Film School train to be part of any video game development team by learning all aspects of game design, from visual storytelling to level design principles to the production process, ultimately creating playable games themselves. In 2008, the Los Angeles Times identified VFS as one of the top 10 game schools “favored by video game industry recruiters” out of more than 200 other schools.

vfs.com/gamedesign

Vancouver Film School’s faculty and Game Design Expo speakers are available for print, television, and radio interviews upon request. For more information, please contact:

Thuy Khuc, Public Relations Coordinator

Vancouver Film School

+1 604.631.3563 or toll-free in North America 1.800.661.4101

thuy@gamedesignexpo.com

We didn’t know anyone wandered into Far Cry 2’s expansive, hojillion-hour-long single-player campaign and somehow managed to make time to check out the game’s multiplayer offerings, but apparently there’s a sizable community of online FC2 players out there. This group has been calling for more realistic match settings for quite some time — players can apparently catch more lead than Sonny Corleone and walk away with little more than a scratch and an interesting story.

Their pleas have been answered — in a recent post on the FC2 community blog, the game’s developers [Ubisoft Montreal] announced a patch which will, in addition to rebalancing the weapons in all multiplayer modes, add a more realistic “hardcore setting” to all match types. This mode will boost the damage for all weapons (ensuring speedier demises) and will let players tweak the “spawn times” (but not the “spawn rates”, whatever that means).

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Narrative designer Patrick Redding and the team behind Far Cry 2 at Ubisoft Montreal have worked for several years to produce a game that operates outside of the strictures of genre — in fact, to deliver a game that operates outside of the strictures of expectation, period.

With great attention paid to dynamic gameplay systems and expansive design, the game has won plaudits from many progressive-minded gamers, but has not satisfied all audiences.

Here, Redding looks back at what the team learned over the course of its three-year development cycle, reflects on current industry trends that informed its development and those that will affect development in the future.

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Funny review of Ubisoft Montreal’s recent sequel, Far Cry 2. Be warned, it might offend some people!

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Check out your own questions, answered by the producer and developers behind the game.

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