Gameplay Programming at Ubisoft

My co-op term at Ubisoft Halifax, where I wrote gameplay code in Unity and C# across two unannounced projects. I cannot go into the games themselves, so this is about the work and the systems rather than what was being made.

Camera, targeting, and AI

Most of my time went into the existing systems and tooling of a Unity project heading toward a prototype milestone. I added several new dynamic camera angles and built the foundation of a camera-clipping solution with Cinemachine and Unity raycasting. I extended the targeting system so it could measure distance both along NavMesh paths and across hex-grid tiles, and I tuned character behaviour trees so the AI matched the direction game design was after.

Alongside that I added debug tools inside the client to make systems like the hex grid easier to inspect and adjust, and squashed a range of bugs that improved both the build itself and the day-to-day of everyone working in it.

Character pipeline and a portable demo

The role was not only gameplay code. I built character art in Maya and Blender and merged it into the project’s existing character systems to get a new, fully animating character into the game, then documented the process so it could be repeated. On a separate project I built a 3D scene and a rigged, animated character in Blender and used Three.js and Capacitor to turn it into a webkit-compatible playable scene, wrapped as an installable Android app. When dependencies broke partway through a milestone, I wrote workarounds to keep the build playable for the demo.

What I took from it

Working inside a large, living codebase with its own bespoke tools taught me to learn a system thoroughly before changing it. The same instinct I lean on everywhere now. Most of the value was in reading carefully, respecting what was already there, and leaving it a little more workable than I found it.