08Assassins Creed
Overview
Assassin’s Creed was coming off its longest hiatus in franchise history.
Valhalla is the 12th major installment in the popular Assassin’s Creed franchise, and with it came another opportunity to help Ubisoft build up excitement and sell more games. Along the way, I also developed their new Buy Component for use on ALL of their marketing sites to allow Ubisoft customers to buy/preorder games.
challenges
How to deliver high-impact, but low-cost additions.
As it turned out Ubisoft wasn’t the only publisher launching a Norse mythology-themed game. God of War recently launched their latest game to much fanfare. Ubisoft was looking to differentiate its marketing and was hungry for high-impact low-cost additions to its marketing site to help build anticipation and drive pre-orders.
Ubisoft also needed a new Buy Component for use on all of its marketing sites. The component needed to fuse data from their store’s API and marketing content from Contentful (the CMS). It had to support over 30 locales, left to right and right to left styling, and multiple alphabets.
approach
Make the effect feel different for each visitor.
We were immediately drawn to the awe-inspiring aurora borealis and thought it would be the perfect way to immerse visitors in a Nordic atmosphere. While a looping video would be okay we wanted greater flexibility and resolution so we turned to WebGL shaders.
features
Make sure every component is configurable and performant.
Utilizing ThreeJS and GLSL we created a performant and dynamic aurora borealis effect. WebGL can be taxing, so I made sure to build in performance monitoring functionality to adapt the experience to the user’s hardware. The design team loved the ability to tweak and adjust the variables of the effect and Ubisoft loved the final outcome.
For the Buy Component, I utilized lessons learned from making other global components for Ubisoft to ensure that the functionality was extensible and easily re-skinnable so that it could integrate with the art direction for any franchise.
results
A Buy Component that is relied upon by Ubisoft to help meet pre-order KPIs across all of their franchise’s marketing sites.