├ÿ Nathalie Paccard, Project Manager (PC, Play Station)
├ÿ Laurence Buisson, International Marketing Manager
Grégoire Gobbi:
├ÿ How long have you been working on Rayman 2 project ?
So far, we have been working on Rayman 2 for one year, we started at the beginning of August 1997 and have been working on it since then.
├ÿ How many people are working on it?
We've got the biggest staff at Ubi Soft. There are 80 people on the team, 40 who are engineers. The rest of the team consists largely of game designers who work in small teams of two with individual graphic designers. Each group is responsible for a specific map or game level.
├ÿ What is new in the organization of the team ?
These teams use the integration tools that Ubi Soft has been developing over the last two years. What is unique about this set-up is that all the game designers and graphic designers develop the AI of characters and different game situations independently. The flexibility of those tools allows an extraordinary increase of creativity. In the "olden days" of video games, the designers used to "order" a character from the engineers, who would then program its behavior before the designers integrated it in the map. This process did not allow rich behaviors. With the development of our tools, we now have 35 people looking for new ideas, developing them themselves and evaluating them in real time gameplay. I think we can assert that Rayman 2 offers a richness of gameplay never seen before in a 3D game.
├ÿ How do you manage with a team split between France and Canada?
In theory, the production takes place in different countries, since Ubi Soft develops our products internationally. For example, the programming team who works on improving the game engine is working in the South of France in Annecy. At the same time, Michel Ancel's team is working in Montpellier. The game designers and the graphic designers are in Paris while all the game testing is handled out of our office in Montreal, Canada.
This sort of structure requires a great deal of coordination. But overall, it works well, partly because of our useful computer network. For instance, we use a tunnel to send huge quantities of data to other countries. We are even able to beat the clock by sending game versions to Canada at night, which are tested and then ready for corrections magically the next morning !
├ÿ Is it the same team that did the original Rayman ?
Almost the entire team who created the original Rayman is involved in the creation of Rayman 2. The universe and the characters are very familiar and everyone wants to make an even better game than the first one !
├ÿ What are the design teams' other accomplishments?
This is also the same team who created Tonic Trouble, the 3D adventure game in a delirious cartoon universe for PC and Nintendo 64, to be released in November 1998.
