Former Ubisoft dev on porting Assassin’s Creed III to Wii U, making Prince of Persia for Wii

Maxime Beaudoin worked at Ubisoft for several years as a technical architect. Last year, he left the company and founded his own studio. Beaudoin thought it would make sense to look back at his time at Ubisoft in a personal blog post.

One interesting part of the piece has Beaudoin speaking about porting Assassin’s Creed III to Wii U. It was no easy task due to the technical challenges involved, but in the end, the team managed to get it done.

Beaudoin wrote:

After PoP, I contributed on several games here and there, and eventually landed on a technically very challenging project: porting Assassin’s Creed 3 on the WiiU. This was very different from my previous work. The team was super small: we were 2 programmers at the beginning, and at the peak I think we were like 15 or something.

I was pretty excited by the challenge. Most people at Ubisoft didn’t think we’d be able to pull that off. All Assassin’s Creed games are very, very intense games in terms of CPU & GPU performance. Believe me, your console is pretty much at its maximum capacity when running around in a big city like Boston (or London). The WiiU was less powerful than the PS3 and XBox 360, at least on paper, so the odds weren’t on our side. Even worse: we had to make a straight port, that is no data changes, just code optimisations. It’s much cheaper to do a straight port than to downgrade all game assets.

After about a year, we reached a point where it became obvious that we’d successfully port the game with similar performances than the 360/PS3. It was a huge success: even Nintendo engineers were surprised we made it. Life was great.

The downside was that the second half of the project was a bit boring. The challenge was gone. Port code, fix bugs and optimize. Rince & repeat until the game is shipped. Overall I keep a good memory of this project, but by the end I was ready to do something completely different…

Beaudoin also looked back on making Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands on Wii:

After Surf’s Up, our studio’s director met us in a conference room (yeah, the entire team fit in a single room… ahhh the good ol’ days). He announced that our next project would be the Wii version of the upcoming Prince of Persia game. I distinctly remember some kind of awkward silence after. Nobody knew if it was good or bad news.

Then someone shouted: “YES!”

Of course, YES. This was WAY better than our previous projects. It wasn’t Assassin’s Creed, but who cares. I remember being a bit disappointed by the console (back at the time, I was super excited by the PS3, not so much about the Wii), but all-in-all, it was very good news.

The project lasted about 3 years, and became known as Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands. It wasn’t a port from the 360/PS3 version: we made a specific version just for the Wii. All in all, it’s a really good game. If you didn’t play it back then, go dust off your Wii and give it a try!

Over my whole time at Ubisoft, this is the project I’m the most proud of. I had a lot of fun, and I had ownership. By that, I mean that I strongly believed that my work had a major impact on the game. My contribution was significant, and when I was playing the game, I could see it everywhere. So, obviously, I was super motivated. I wanted that game to be the most awesome game ever. Most developers know that feeling very well.

At its peak, the team size was about 75 developers. It’s a big family, but still a family. Over the course of the project, I had to interact with most of these people. I’m pretty sure I talked at least once to everyone on the project. You might wonder why I focus so much on team sizes, but more on that later…

You can find Beaudoin’s full blog post here.