08Assassins Creed
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- Client
- Ubisoft
- Agency
- Five & Done
- Role
- Lead Front-End Developer
- Technologies
- React • SCSS • WebGL • Redux • GraphQL • Contentful
- Live URL
- View
Overview
Assassin’s Creed wascoming off its longesthiatus 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, butlow-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 foreach 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 isconfigurable 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.