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Frédéric Giraud (Level Designer, Ubisoft Paris)
Location: Room 2002, West Hall
Date: Friday, March 24
Time: 1:30 pm - 2:30 pm
Pass Type: All Access Pass, Core Pass
Topic: Design
Format: Lecture
Vault Recording: Video
Audience Level: All
Layered Battles is a system created by Ubisoft to procedurally generate a variety of tactical battles through Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, with specific battles intentions in mind. It allowed the team to win production time over battle creation, to focus on the tactical aspect, while maintaining a high-quality level.
To achieve that, the team had to question what the opportunities and needs were for this new game compared to Kingdom Battle. The production went through multiple prototypes, ending with the current system.
Every battle is decomposed in 4 layers: Arena chunks, Covers, Navigation, and Enemies and Spawns.
Each layer is composed of multiples assets tagged with keywords, which are stored in a library. Multiples tags from different layers can be taken from the library to be used in the configuration files to guide the generation system towards a specific result.
Attendees will discover how Ubisoft approached Procedural Generation in Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, how they defined the system and game needs and goals, what were the multiple developments steps and challenges they had to tackle, and how they managed to blur the line between handcrafted and generated tactical levels.
This is mainly for designers, but anyone interested in procedural generation and overall game design would be interested. The talk doesn't require any prerequisite knowledge, but having Level Design knowledge or having played Mario + Rabbits: Sparks of Hope does help.