Watch Dogs Legion: Launch Trailer
Last October, my team at Ubisoft released Watch Dogs Legion. Having joined Ubisoft Toronto specifically for this project, it was an exciting milestone. Despite a decade as a professional game designer, this was a big milestone: my first AAA release. I spent 4 exciting and challenging years on it, seeing the game evolve from pre-production all the way to the final box on the shelves of Best Buy.
Read MoreSo my plan to do a lot more writing over the last year got sidetracked by a whole bunch of other activities. And now at the beginning of 2017, I'm in a very different place. Quite literally. In early January I returned to Ontario for an exciting new position at Ubisoft Toronto! I'm now a Game Designer / Monetization Specialist on a great team and back in the AAA console game space. Much excitement all around. I'm sure I'll have more to say about the fun challenges of the new role as I settle in. Then in the short term, I'm looking forward to my 9th consecutive GDC (woah!) starting next week.
Read MoreI don't usually make New Year's resolutions, but moving into 2016 I had a clear goal: Write More. I really do enjoy writing, mostly as it's a way of getting my thoughts organized. There's a frustrating number of half-written posts/articles from the last year where I got bogged down in things like structure, what to say in the opening paragraph, or whether or not it's getting across the right point. Then the post languishes in Evernote and I move on to something else. So this is the start of my plan to write a bit more often. For my first post of 2016, how about a year in review? I'll talk about what I'm up to and my favorite music, game, movie, tv show, and book of 2015.
Read MoreAfter nearly 2 years of development, my team at Uken Games soft-launched Loot Quest to Canadian iPads. With that milestone, it's interesting to look back at my old moleskine notebook with the 6 scribbled pages where Loot Quest was conceived in September 2012.
I was driving from Toronto to Allentown Pennsylvania for a friend's wedding and got to thinking about what Uken's next mobile RPG could be. That weekend a bunch of the ideas swirling through my head began to take shape. Just before my drive back to Canada, while eating horrifyingly (see: deliciously) sugary pancakes at a Bob Evans, I began to jot down some notes....
Read MoreNo surprise here, I’m a humongous Kimbra fan. This was my most-anticipated album of the year. One of the things I love about Kimbra is her experimentation and refusal to pigeonhole her sound. The Golden Echo is incredibly varied, and totally different from her first album. It blows my mind that Miracle wasn't...
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