Game’n Breakfast : Marc Albinet

A warm welcome! Sit back, relax and enjoy a cup of coffee or tea. It’s the last Sunday of the month, time for another Game’n Breakfast. This time, we’re taking a break from the world of independent games to find out more about the career of a senior figure in French video games and beyond. I had the chance to talk to Marc Albinet, best known for his work as game director on Assassin’s Creed Unity, about his career since the 1980s. Personally, I think it’s worth taking a break from the frenetic pace of the industry from time to time and taking stock. That’s what we’ve done. From the outset, we quickly agreed with Marc that there aren’t many interviews in the video games industry that really focus on people rather than products, and that’s a shame. I didn’t get in touch with him because of any current events, but only because I’d started reading his book “Concevoir un jeu vidéo” (Designing a video game) and I thought that this exchange could be rich in many ways. So we retraced his career as a thread through which to explore many other things, to get the opinion of an industry veteran.

From cinema to video game

Marc began by studying cinema, and this background enabled him to make an initial observation: video games are not yet a cultural medium, we are in a medium that is above all commercial. Before you take offence, I invite you to read this paper right to the end, where we detail this point. If, after reading this, you feel like discussing it, I invite you to do so on our Discord, where I’d be delighted to chat. In the same vein, it’s hard to separate people from the JV industry in the same way as a film director. Behind this lies an almost historical reason, the desire not to put an individual in the spotlight who might push them to demand things (we’ll just mention the Konami/Kojima disagreement as an example). Studios, as well as the public, cling to the idea that games are the fruit of close-knit, indivisible teams. There are hundreds of developers (in the case of the biggest productions) who contribute their stone to the edifice, yet the way in which we perceive the two media is totally different. It’s important to talk about teamwork, but there are also questions of copyright that can arise. For Marc, a coder can just as easily be an author (change my mind!). Everyone who works on a project rarely falls into JV by chance. Everyone has a life story, a feeling, an experience and ideas to share. It’s an advantage for those who work with their heads in the sand to be able to exchange ideas with colleagues who have a bit of distance and can provide food for thought.

Marc likes to touch on everything because he believes it’s necessary to understand what’s going on in its entirety in order to identify the needs and constraints of each member of a team. This is especially true in a team of developers, where there are many different areas of expertise with a different language, yet all have to work towards the same goal. In order to communicate effectively, trying out different specialities is the best way of creating professional empathy and understanding.

Commodore 64
Commodore 64

The first console he bought, thanks to cherry-picking, was the Colecovision (1982). He then took a job in a supermarket and invested in a Commodore 64 (1983). He soon began learning assembler (the most basic programming language) from books – there were no YouTube tutorials at the time. At the same time, he began a career as an audio cassette pirate, sending cassettes by post. He also got into pixel art, which was as artistic as it could be on the machines of the time, so nothing crazy. So he found himself combining the two worlds and doing graphics for demomaking ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene ). He answered an advert from Ubisoft for a graphics designer job on the Commodore 64, which he landed. Once at the company, which was to become the multinational we know today, he met a lot of people and found himself in Ubi’s castle. The château de la Grée de Callac, near the forest of Brocéliande, was rented out in the 1980s to young developers. Marc found himself working on Amiga productions (1986).

From creative assistant to author


Then came the famous military service, at the end of which he was looking for a new job. He had two options: Delphin Software ( Another World ) and Infogrames (Tintin in Tibet ). Being from Lyon, he chose the local company with the armadillo. The job market wasn’t the same as it is today. The position available was that of creative assistant to Patrick Charpenet (Artistic Director), but when Hubert Chardot (head of the PC division and scriptwriter of the Alone in the Dark series) met him, he offered him a job as producer. Let’s face it, we were working with small teams and limited projects in the 90s. He worked on Alone in the Dark 2 and Prisoner of Ice. He also did some writing. He was then contacted by a new studio, Adeline Software, for whom he took on the role of scriptwriter and game designer on the Little Big Adventure 2 project. It was a time when things were done through contacts, when one project ended and another began elsewhere, and jobs moved around a lot.

This is one of the problems that we find nowadays with much larger projects. The need for human resources varies enormously over the course of development, which means that you end up with the equivalent of the status of a casual worker without the positive side that allows you to receive help in times of need. If we take the example of the period when Marc was working on Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft operated in the following way: the main studio was supported by other, more versatile teams. This model allowed flexibility in the tasks assigned to different projects, while maintaining a core group working on a specific game. It’s a way of doing things that’s not very widespread, which is why the industry is experiencing such a hecatomb in 2023/24, even if it’s far from the only explanation. The production of a video game requires a staff that fluctuates according to the progress of the project, hence the real need for intermittence. The Covid period was an aberration in terms of human resources, and the growing demand for JVs led to a lot of unreasonable hiring, which is part of the reason for the redundancies that the industry is currently experiencing (Editor’s note: I’d like to make it clear that the situation is much more complex than that, and that it’s also due to the interference of big studios). If we take the example of what happened at Embracer, the management wanted to swallow a considerable number of studios to the point of causing indigestion, which would, no doubt, have been predictable, resulting in resales and closures shortly after the purchase.

Let’s get back on track. When he was at Infogrames, Marc bumped into an old school friend who had a video compression company, which did work for the armadillo studio, and they kept in touch. Then this friend wanted to start developing interactive CDs and Marc wanted to do some dev. It was the time of
Little Big Adventure 2 and Adeline Software’s evolution didn’t really appeal to Marc. So he took the chance he was offered. A studio, Heliovisions, began to emerge, giving birth to a game called Hexplore, a voxel-based isometric 3D PC game inspired by board games. The title didn’t do too badly, and was one of the first online games. Four players online was a big revolution at the time. Then the company, renamed Doki Denki Studio, worked with Infogrames on Playstation. This led to a number of recruitments, including a producer from Electronic Arts London, a certain Raphaël Colantonio, who went on to found the Arkane studio. Doki Denki then signed up for Disney productions, notably Winnie the Pooh. They won a small Bafta on the way. Next came the takeover of Delphine Software, which was in bankruptcy, with the help of Vivendi, which had pledged to support the production. The French media group cut off funding two months later, forcing the studio into bankruptcy. For the record, with Delphine, they recovered Motoracer 4 . There were things to keep, notably the three Cs (Camera, Character, Control) of the motorbike, so they decided to continue development, but the months of non-payment by Vivendi and the dwindling cash flow meant that the game could not be finished. Giving up was not an option, and they decided to try again with a new studio, the aptly named Phoenix. The fact that it had worked for Disney and that the American brand was delegating European publishing to local companies, at least at that time, prompted Ubisoft to come and see what was going on. The two companies have a history of working together on a number of titles.

In parallel with the collaboration with Ubi, they are trying to develop a new technology, video games on DVD players. In simple terms, the aim was to use the unused buttons on the remote control to trigger the playback of video tracks depending on the video in progress. For example, pressing button A between frames 250 and 380 would trigger video 43, making it possible to move a character. A demo was released, followed by a full game. In those years, the DVD player was the most widespread multimedia device in the home. It was a failure, not that the concept wasn’t good, but distribution was complicated. Once the game arrived at the point of sale, there was nowhere for it to be displayed, on the DVD or video game shelves, so there was no visibility. It was a shame, because it was a format that worked, technically, very well and was more accessible than a console game. The studio ended up sinking, and they started up another one with lots of projects, for Ubisoft among others, for the DS, PS2, PS3, but with the crash of 2008, all the contracts came to an end and the company died again. It’s important to remember that back then there were no game engines like Unreal or Unity. Developers had to create their own from scratch or buy it from another team, either way it was a lot of work. Not to mention that the only funding solutions were publishers, not crowdfunding or Steam and, of course, the banker who laughs in your face when you explain that you need funds to make a game. Manufacturing and physical distribution are the publisher’s responsibility, but they still count towards the financing. Marc eventually got fed up of working in an independent studio and decided to call it a day. He took the opportunity to write his book “Concevoir un jeu vidéo”. Having worked with a number of designers, he already had a lot of methodological documentation. It took just two months to turn it all into a book. He also used this time to think about what to do next and ended up back at Ubisoft. His new role involved training and rational methodology.

Marc Albinet : Image de Little Big Adventure 2
Little Big Adventure 2

From Rational Game Design to User eXperience

Rational game design (RGD) is a very powerful tool, but it’s also very abstract and therefore very complicated to implement, because this degree of abstraction is still quite rare in teams. As far as Marc is concerned, 95% of designers are people who have ideas and then apply them, which is a long way from design in the strict sense of the word. Professionals who can answer the question “Why is this gameplay fun? are not that common. Rational game design is a method based on the analysis of players’ skills, on the physical, mental or social skills that are brought into play, which are then rationalised in order to achieve a much more appropriate level of difficulty. In-game data collection can be used to dynamically modify the game as a function of the player’s actions, ultimately delivering a personalised experience and guaranteed fun (editor’s note: a concept we also touched on with Doot in May’s GnB). A very good example of this process is Left 4 Dead 2, for which Valve hired an artificial intelligence director so that the game could adapt to the group during play. On a more micro scale, we also find it in Jak and Daxter, with a fishing game in which the fish arrived according to the data collected beforehand. When Ubisoft hosted Nintendo, the team showed them this methodology, to which the Japanese replied that it was great, but that they’d been doing it for twenty years on Mario. Still, it’s gratifying to be able to put your finger on a concept used by gameplay masters such as the company with the big N. The hardest part is getting this tool deployed, because people tend to be against it or don’t see the point, but that usually guarantees a 90+ rating. Marc has never managed to deploy it completely, even though he tries every time. Olivier Palmieri, level designer on Rayman Legends, has managed to pull it off, and we certainly owe some of the quality of the title to him (92 metacritic). It’s not uncommon for designers to put their ideas together and retain absolute control, thinking that this is the master recipe for a good video game, when in fact it’s not that simple. A good designer is capable of answering the question “why isn’t it fun? From his experience as a trainer, Marc has noticed that developers find it hard to detach themselves from their practical experience in order to implement the RGD; moving from theory to practice is complicated. But some manage to do it very well. When he worked on Dying Light 2, he trained two level designers who appropriated the concept and deployed it in the game. After that, they gave several talks to demonstrate their new way of working.

Game design is one of those areas where anyone can produce something, as opposed to code or modelling, where you quickly realise that you can’t come up with anything of quality. In writing, it’s difficult to stand back and assess your work, which no doubt leads to disparate results. And yet, just like drawing or music, design requires a set of tools that you have to learn to master, understand and use at the right moment, but it also has the particularity of being intangible in its effectiveness. The number of games being released is exploding, and we are far from having only good quality games. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing – a large number of amateur games are among my favourite titles – but finding the nugget requires a lot of sorting. There’s another thing that Marc explains to the designer: if the design isn’t square, it’s the coder who’s going to refine it. For the feature to run in the game, he has to fill in the missing pieces and the design may not be good, but the game will run. That’s why young graduates are often confronted with the difficult reality of design, but when they manage to grasp the exhilarating side of creation, they quickly fall in love with it. Design is a bit like cooking: you can’t make a gourmet dish by assembling leftovers from the fridge. It’s still edible, but you can’t open a restaurant from it. It’s sometimes difficult to get people to understand that game design is like jewellery, and that one dysfunctional element can bring the whole thing crashing down. 

Even though the profession of designer is now recognised, many people have the wrong definition of it. A GD’s primary function is not to invent features and find ways of implementing them in the game engine. Its main role should be to make the game fun and translate that into something that can be made. To make sure that these features work before you start rolling out the big guns, it’s important to put them through their paces. That’s why the conceptualisation and pre-production phases need to be pushed to the limit before moving on to the next stage. The aim is to deristify the feasibility, fun and quality of the experience. Going into production with a real vertical slice, lasting 20 minutes or 2 hours, means that you know all the problems beforehand and how to deal with them. From a design point of view, it lets you know how you’re going to manage progress in the game, and in particular how to manage difficulty, which is a big part of the fun. It also allows you to assess the resources required and the time (plus or minus the imponderables) needed to develop the game for a solid release. Reboots during production are a nightmare and should be avoided. Producers often have difficulty understanding this approach, wanting to start production as quickly as possible. Marc often uses the allegory of the building; everyone agrees that it’s stupid to start building without a plan, but transposing this to the JV is not so obvious. There’s a lot of pressure in the industry, particularly in terms of schedules that have to be met before production even starts. You end up going through milestones without really knowing where you’re going, only to realise halfway through that the direction you’ve taken isn’t the right one. There’s also the false security of patching that we’re seeing more and more with games that sometimes take years to get right – Cyberpunk 2077 springs to mind.

The same applies to UX, which, contrary to what some people think, is not just about having pleasant menus in the game. What we were talking about earlier, adaptive difficulty, is UX, user experience. It’s an area that is far from being the sole responsibility of UI artists. When Marc arrived at Techland (Dying Light), he helped a producer, who had a degree in UX, to set up the usability testing process. The aim was to assess user needs and to have the telemetry tools to measure them. It’s all very well to collect data during the test phases, but without a process for interpreting it and making improvements, there’s not much point. It’s important to emerge from a test with clear areas for improvement, the most frequently encountered problems and their solutions, so that you can fix them and take advantage of the next session to check that these problems no longer exist and find new ones, and so on. The company’s management has to realise that this is important, and that’s not easy. And even in small studios, which are more sensitive to this, there is a lack of resources, so it’s not easy to have truly effective playtests. These tests are not just there to measure the degree of engagement of players, the level of fun is just as important. Putting all this in place is often a matter of diplomacy, because we are still in a world where it is the one who speaks loudest who is right.

Marc Albinet : Image de Dying Light 2
Dying Light 2

From blockbusters to experimentation

If we look back at Marc’s career path, his desire to discover the big productions led him to leave Paris for Ubisoft Montreal, where he joined the Human Resources department. In this department, a veteran from each branch acted as a link between the teams and the HR department to establish skills and salary scales, among other things. Although he was interested in this aspect, Marc always kept in mind his desire to go into production. After eight months, the Assassin’s Creed project in progress had lost its game director and during a meeting, during which the project leader was talking about the fact that they were developing elements that were ultimately of no use to them, Marc explained his methodology and that’s how he landed an interview. Once he’d joined the Unity project, he was quickly made to understand that he didn’t really have any say in the matter, as he’d never taken part in an Assassin’s Creed (AC) game. He quickly realised that an AC game should above all be an infiltration game, the myth of the assassin you don’t see until it’s too late. The project therefore took the direction of an infiltration game, but also a difficult one. At the time, the franchise’s battles were always one-on-one, with enemies waiting their turn to be killed. It was time to break away from this model and switch to more dynamic combat with several enemies at once, and the end of one-on-five combat meant that standing up to more than two attackers became almost impossible. The team was still firmly convinced that AC was and should remain a casual game. The mandate for this opus was to bring together single-player and multiplayer in the same space, hence the name Unity. Until then, these had been two completely separate areas of content. The team didn’t quite know how to set it up and were thinking of designing a specific place to launch the co-op missions, but that wasn’t Marc’s vision. So he took a screenshot of a view from the rooftops of Notre-Dame, placing markers here and there to indicate a player passing by, a co-op mission, something you might find in a World of Warcraft, a benchmark for online gaming. With hindsight, the problem was that they had started designing the game with people who had never played online games (remember that development of the game began in 2010).

After that, Marc mainly worked as a consultant on Rainbow Six Siege and Assassin’s Creed Origins, trying to develop new concepts. After Unity, in Montreal, there was only one AC team left, the Black Flag team, which was working on Origins, so Marc had to find a new team to do development. In Quebec, positions are highly prized and it’s not the mentality to fire someone simply to replace them, because the most important thing is cohesion and if the team is working well, you don’t change it. So he decided to do something different. He joined a small studio that was working on an online survival game, a la Rust, but the studio lacked maturity, so after a year Marc set off again. At that point Alexandre Amancio, former creative director on AC, told him about his plans to set up a new studio, Reflector. The project’s interesting ambitions made Marc want to join. But after 2 years, a difference of vision put an end to the collaboration, as the project was too ambitious for the studio’s capacity. After he left, Marc did a bit of freelance work, before being snapped up by Techland for Dying Light 2. The studio had increased its workforce fivefold and was unable to be fully effective. So he took a job as game director and, drawing on his experience, helped the studio go all the way to producing the game we know today. The main problem was that the team was biting off more than it could chew and the scope had to be reduced. At a meeting with the boss, Pavel, and the producers, the discussion revolved around the little bits they could drop. On an Assassin’s Creed, we generally cut 50% of the content we initially planned. With this project and its seven regions, Marc advised keeping just two. At the end of the meeting, there were only three zones left, then two months later, one less. This reduction enabled the project to be completed. After this superb adventure, Marc decided to leave the studio because living in Poland without speaking the language quickly became restrictive. Marc remembers that development in Eastern Europe, even if the management is particular, is marked by authenticity and a frank desire to make quality products.

Marc Albinet : Image d'Assassin Creed : Unity
Assassin’s Creed Unity

In the meantime, Reflector had been bought out by Bandai Namco, who, wanting to get into publishing, moved to Lyon, where Marc took a job for a year. The project for which he had been hired was to last 10 years, during which time he would be working as a consultant, and that wasn’t what interested him. Finally, he joined a studio, Darewise, bought by Animoca Brands, which had been working on a game for five years (in 2022) and which should be out by the end of the year. It’s a Web2 game, with Web3 components, free-to-play. Web3 is much maligned at the moment, but for Marc, it has too much potential to be ignored. There are some very interesting things to be gleaned from it, and he’s rediscovering the pioneering spirit he experienced a long time ago. He has a strong desire for research and genuine creation, by which he means not repeating models that have already been used many times. His aim is to leave a mark on the people who play this game, to try and make them think. It’s a game about the prisoner’s dilemma and the notion of trust, a social game. The players are the survivors of a crash in a crater, from which it is impossible to escape, with few resources, so this is a survival game. It’s an MMO with a collective inventory, and each player has to take on a unique function that is used for crafting, and to progress players have to work together. Putting an item in the collective chest earns points, taking it out costs points. This first concept is a true economy of group survival: producing something that earns a lot of points requires high-value ingredients. The second part is combat, with an equipment levelling system that allows rare and effective weapons to be transformed into NFTs. As the game is permanent and constantly evolving, the resources collected do not reappear, so what is released in NFT will not be used by the community to progress. The heart of the game is therefore the progression of all players against personal enrichment in the real world. It’s a complete departure from traditional gaming and a social experiment: does personal well-being take precedence over that of the community? There are also plans to be able to leave the crater at a certain stage of progression and develop an industry, a policy and the foundation of a society, so we’re getting into a simulation of human behaviour. At the time of our conversation, Marc was impatient to see the first playtests, which were delayed because the whole game had to be playable, in order to see how players would behave. In the tested version, it will be impossible to take out money, but Marc would like, in the future, to put players to the test by offering them the chance to lose their entire ingame collective point in exchange for a fifty-dollar Amazon card, just to see how they react. For the moment, the priority remains producing a profitable free-to-play Web2 game. The whole Web3 thing may come later, when its implementation is less divisive. Put simply, it’s a bit Like Among Us meets Enshrouded.

Video games allow us to work on social issues, to work on human issues with a large number of people, so we can do interesting things that will leave an impression on people. These are concepts that we’ve just touched on with MMOs without really going all the way, even though Eve Online goes further than the others. Marc is convinced that this prisoner’s dilemma, this problem of trust, is at the heart of the malfunctioning of our modern society, which generates incivility and selfishness. We are all witnesses to the consequences of the growing individualism in our world. Based on this observation, Marc hopes that the game he’s working on will open our eyes and initiate a change, an evolution in the way we behave. This is where video games become artistic, an art form that allows us to do things that will change people and help society evolve in the same way as a film or a book. Video games for entertainment are all very well, but if they can also be cultural and become a driving force for a better world, then we’re on the right track. Papers, Please, for example, is an excellent example of what Marc is talking about, a game with a simple concept but a strong message that won’t let any player leave without asking questions. Too few games manage to do this, but those that do don’t leave you indifferent (did we mention 1000xResist ?). We need this kind of game, and it’s undoubtedly the way in which JV will evolve, because the purely commercial machine has already been tried and tested. Today, Marc wants to do something more profound. Even if the Assassin’s Creed saga isn’t the worst, the things it tries are only superficial, the Templar/Assassin duality, which opposes two visions of the world, isn’t exploited enough, whereas it could give rise to very interesting things like we could find in The Last of Us: Part II. If we take the cultural aspect of the ACs, it’s also not pushed far enough. The location is merely a marketing invitation to travel, and the time period is a context that you can only experience from afar. Of course, you need games to relax in, where you can put your brain down, but it would be a shame to be satisfied with just that, and it would be a disservice to the medium that is video games. While the world of JV is often compared to that of cinema, and Marc has a foot in both, he does note a lack of maturity in the pixel industry. All the same, we’re coming to a time when the first gamers and developers are getting older and aspire to something different, not that this isn’t the case for those who followed, but we can sense an evolution in the medium. When he was at Ubisoft, Marc carried out a study of playing time as a function of gamer age. He came up with a parabola with a lot of playing time in adolescence and early adulthood, then a decrease as people enter working life and family life, and finally an increase around the age of forty and a return to a more relaxed life. But the forty-something gamer doesn’t have the same desires, and will be more selective in terms of the quality of his or her games. It’s also possible that what’s missing are games that can be shared like a film in a group, as a couple or as a family. Anyone who loves to play games wants to share them with their loved ones, and this may be one of the limitations of today’s JV, but it’s one that will eventually fall away – we’ve seen the beginnings of something like this with the Nintendo Wii. It’s a demand that’s going to continue to grow and will succeed in attracting the attention of publishers. The problem is always the same: you need backers who take risks to try and bring something new to an industry that’s going round in circles. And if we look at the problem from the point of view of independent games, which are trying new things, the whole problem lies in being able to stand out from the astronomical number of games being released every day.

To an unknown future

We have finally retraced Marc’s entire career, which spans almost forty years in the world of video games. Since the 1980s, the world of video games has become much more professional, with a shift from creative freedom to the need for commercial profitability. Marc remembers a time when just about anything was available to fill the shelves in the shops; today those same shelves have expanded tenfold, but places are expensive. Video games have been industrialised. It’s not necessarily quality that makes a game a success, although that’s a factor, but above all the ability to create a community around its creation. The player is drowned out by the possibilities. Marc senses that a profound change is afoot, but hasn’t really identified it yet. You might think that the cultural aspect is slowly emerging, and we’re seeing more and more games along these lines. For him, Web3 is one of the ways in which this transformation is taking place. Gamers are looking for new things, and rehashing the same adventures over and over again with a different wrapping risks driving consumers away to other things if the industry doesn’t renew itself. Just the increase in the number of players in the independent games sphere is an indicator that the AAA formula is running out of steam. It’s mainly for this reason that Marc has such a rich CV, he didn’t want to get stuck in a creative rut doing the same thing for decades.

Marc Albinet : Artwork de Life Beyond
Artwork of Life Beyond

This interview ends with this vision of the future. It was a rich moment, not only because of the number of subjects that were discussed, but also because of the fact that after so much time at the heart of the industry, Marc is still as passionate as ever. He’s bursting with the desire to share his experience and exchange ideas to get as many points of view as possible. Looking back over his career and the decades that have just gone by makes you realise just how far the video game industry has come. The change is all the more perceptible today, because some difficult situations have loosened tongues. Now, more than ever, we need to give a voice to the professionals of this exceptional medium. Get to know the people who make it possible for you to play, so that you can understand everything that development involves. The JV may lose a little of its superbness, but the world to be discovered is fascinating. As for us, we’ll be back next month for another episode of GnB. This time I’ve gone to meet Marie Marquet, co-founder and creative director of SplashTeam, to discuss her career and what it means to be a woman in the JV world. See you soon at Point’n Think!

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