Ubisoft Montreal has spent the past six years immersed in the world of Assassin’s Creed. After developing an engine that is now powering multiple game franchises, the team was able to create Assassin’s Creed II in two years. Jade Raymond, executive producer of the game, has been part of this process from day one. She talks about what gamers have in story with this sequel to the 8 million-selling original game, as well as the Assassin’s Creed: Lineage short films, in this exclusive interview.

How did having the game engine built help you with this sequel?

With Assassin’s Creed 1 we set about doing lots of things at once. We created a new franchise and new characters and stuff and also a new engine that we wanted to become our next generation engine. Videogames are always changing, so every time you have a new console, you have to rewrite all of the software. We had a team of 300 people working on the game and you want them to have good tools and be working efficiently. So we invested a lot of our time and energy into creating this kind of engine and tool set that we could re-use and it’s being re-used in Assassin’s Creed II. It’s being reused in the Shawn White Snowboarding game. It’s being reused in actually about I think eight different games now across Ubisoft. So the team is pretty happy about that, too.

What were your goals heading into Assassin’s Creed II?

The Renaissance

Obviously, part of what we’re trying to give people is the gameplay experience of being a bad-ass assassin and that’s always really fun gameplay wise. But we also wanted to deliver an experience and let people really experience that time period in a new way and maybe uncover a little bit more than they new about the Renaissance, including some of the darker sides of it. So we worked a few different historians to make sure we’re getting that accuracy. We also worked with costume designers and these kinds of people you actually wouldn’t think. We also worked with a weapons maker who built a real version of the hidden blade. In addition to being able to  check how that would work in the gameplay, we were able to use it in the short films we did with Hybride Technologies.

Can you talk about those Hybride Assassin’s Creed: Lineage films?

Ubisoft purchased Hybride a little while ago and as part of our strategy we really see that there’s a lot to benefit. We don’t see there being one new media that movies are going to go in and that games are going to go at all. What we do see is a great opportunity to collaborate and learn from each other. That’s what we’ve really been trying to do with the Assassins Creed short movies. One of the great things that we’ve learned is that we actually have much better casting techniques. We’ve tapped into some of the their expertise and connections in the film industry to get a hold of these better quality actors that that we didn’t know how to reach before because we had our usual talent base. Also, things like having a costume designer working with our art director who is doing the character design so that the real-life aspect of costume design can influence what we normally do in videogames. Conversely, there are also a lot of different things going on in the technology side in the short movies that they’re using from our game and we’re experimenting with a lot of new techniques with Hybride to built and take what they did on the movie 300 even further.

Can you talk about how these short films were shot using green screen technology?

A new assassin

There are certain things you would do if you’re shooting on green screen like build out a layout of the set so that actors know where to walk and where stuff is supposed to be. What we did was blend real-world game scenes with the actors afterwards. We’ve created a system where we can project those environments onto the ground and the actors play around the projected scenes from the game, which saves a ton of time because you don’t need people to go in an build props and measure everything out. We just go the right size projection, made it to scale, and projected it on the ground and the actors were able to play off of that. So there was a lot of interesting learning going both ways with these films.

How do the short films tie into the new game?

The short films are a prequel to Assassin’s Creed. One of the things that we really wanted to do was create powerful enemies and really add depth to the story that might be difficult to do in a game without having to do any cut scenes. When you’re a player, you just want to be in the action. You don’t want to listen to all this back story. So we thought this was a great opportunity to explain what’s been going on with Ezio’s family, what’s been going on in the political scene at the time, and set up the story and some of the main characters. Hopefully, if you watch these, you’ll already come into the game hating certain people.

Speaking of the game, what’s new gameplay-wise for Ezio Auditore?

Ezio in action

Part of the game takes place in Venice and of course Venice is filled with canals, so you need to have some swimming and some boat gameplay. It’s a great ingredient for hiding because it lets you dive under water and stay under water to hide from guards. It also gives you some gameplay opportunities because you can sneak up beside people who are standing by the water and pull them into the water. There is a lot of other gameplay also with some boats and missions that will take you through the Venice canals.