Less Than a month left... 0.0

Before I started at Ubisoft I was really focusing on my understanding of presentation and composition. I was confident about my ability to model, texture and use the engine I was however struggling a lot with composition and presentation. Fortunately the work I've been doing here has allowed me to continue practising those things. At points I have felt like I wasn't learning anything but have realised that I haven't been learning exact techniques or something that I can say "This is what I have learnt" instead I feel I have improved the more difficult to define... stuff.

The range of work I've been doing is quite large, from the almost daily need for text to be changed on a template to the continuous endeavour of finding the right places to show off the DLC but the over-arching work has pretty much been composition and presentation. This is a really long and not very exciting or engaging process as knowing the places to go in the town to find worthy compositions and really nicely refined assets is difficult and much of what I need to do is roam around the gameworld. The open world nature of the Assassins Creed series means that finding that perfect place to take a stunning screenshot is actually more difficult that in a more linear game. I'm finding that I need to repeatedly try and imagine I've been given a pretty buggy camera and being told, go and find the most impressive way to show off the town. I'm normally really good at taking far too many photos and find a few gems but this feels so different.

Today came one of the major things that I have had to confront about working in the industry. The work that I've been doing for the past few weeks was on a rough brief that I thought had been decided upon by the people in charge of marketing ACU: Dead Kings. It turns out that I have spent the past few weeks working on a very rough brief that was just a first draft brief and hadn't been talked about in much detail. The meeting was great in terms of ironing out all the problem areas with the proposed screenshots but it also meant that I have to ignore the work that I've been doing and go back to the early research stage of the process, essentially losing a couple of weeks of work.

Spent about a week making a more colouful cover for M!Games
They went with our original proposal of the game's Key Art

Looking back I can remember a huge number of times I have spent days or weeks working on something only to be told that they want something else; for technical, artistic or even third party reasons. This is something that YOU HAVE TO GET USED TO. Quick turnarounds are essential as it doesn't matter how much time you have spent on something if that thing is not needed... its not needed. Start work straight away on the new brief but remember to keep as much work as possible just in case that original thing is actually needed in the end. Briefs aren't clearly defined and often the people setting the briefs haven't yet had the time to develop the briefs or they simply haven't talked to other people about the briefs and so they are always changing, flipfloping and in general they aren't definite.

Such was Uni, Such is Industry. Such is Life