Watch Dogs

Once Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag was done, I went straight on to Watch Dogs, Ubisoft’s new open world game set in a hyperconnected Chicago, where the hacker Aiden Pearce can take control of the whole city from his phone.

The game was developed by Ubisoft Montreal, with the help of several Ubisoft studios, Ubisoft Paris among them. Another animator and I joined the project from Annecy, on a mission for the Paris team.

To make Chicago feel truly alive, the game needed more than 5,000 animations for its citizens alone. That is the part of the game I worked on.

Bringing Chicago’s citizens to life

We started with two or three days in Paris to meet the team. Then we went back to Annecy and worked remotely: Paris sent us the animations, we processed them and sent them back.

My work was mostly motion editing on the citizens, the NPCs who fill the streets of Chicago.

They were driven by an AI system that was new to me. Each citizen waited in an idle animation until the player came close, which triggered an action. Once that action was over, the citizen went back to idle.

Another engine, another philosophy

Watch Dogs also ran on its own engine, different from the one I had used on Assassin’s Creed. Discovering another way of building animation tools, and another software philosophy, was really enriching.

Watch Dogs was a short project, but after four years on Assassin’s Creed, it broadened my view of the craft.