Ubisoft Hosts Budding Developers for Competition

Building Your Job

NewsVince Morello — Published March 27, 2016

Blocking her way are ghostly figures, which she dispatches quickly with a bolt of ice. This is the premise of a video game called Ada, which was presented at the 2016 Game Lab Competition last Friday.

At this annual event, students from Montreal universities get together to show their games to professional developers at Ubisoft.

Video by Hélène Bauer

“If we want to keep the gem that we have in Montreal that is the video game industry, we need to have a new generations of developers,” said Fabrice Giguere, public relations and communications at Ubisoft Montreal. “It would be counterproductive if we would not help [the students] creativity flow free.”

Every year Ubisoft has a different theme and challenge for the students. This year the theme was oceans and the challenge was building a 3D system. Some of the students’ obstacles are hitting deadlines, and dealing with other constraints that are similar to problems developers face on a daily basis.

Throughout the development process, Ubisoft employees give feedback and advice to the teams.

Multiple Concordia students were presenting games. Some teams consisted of only Concordia students, while others teamed up with students from Polytechnique.

Three students from Concordia—Romina Rabti Zolpirani, Maria Abou Rizk and Lianne Maritzer—partnered with students from Polytechnique to develop the puzzle platformer, Ada. Ada falls in love with Davy Jones, but Jones rips out her heart and feeds it to his pet Kraken, a mythical sea monster. Ada then jumps into the Kraken, and so begins her story.

The trio settled on the idea for the story pretty quickly, and then the game started to take shape.

“This year I decided to do it again, it was a great experience. I talked to who was in charge and he asked me to bring two other artists on the team,” said Rabti Zolpirani, the lead artist, 3D modeler/texturer and concept artist, for Ada, who had worked on a game last year.

Making the game itself is not the easiest of tasks, even for professional developers. The team had some issues balancing school and working on the game, but they ultimately came through. The team also had struggles porting the game to Unity, a game engine.

Winners of the competition receive $22,000-worth in scholarships, but to win they have to impress the jurors, who consist of Ubisoft employees. The prizes are separated by categories, so there are multiple awards to hand out.

“It’s really a once-in-a-lifetime chance, you don’t really get to have something with Ubisoft. It’s a very big company so you really want to take anything they offer you,” Abou Rizk said.

“It’s really a once-in-a-lifetime chance, you don’t really get to have something with Ubisoft.” —Maria Abou Rizk, animator and rigger for Ada.

The grand prize is an internship at Ubisoft. At least ten of the best students at the competition will be given the opportunity to work with the teams that developed Far Cry, Rainbow Six, and Assassins Creed.

Impressing the developers at Ubisoft can even mean getting a job with the company.

“The team that won best prototype of the year last year, we’ve hired three of four of the students,” Giguere said. “We even had one of them who worked on Far Cry Primal.”

The awards will be handed out on a later date.