Frank Favre

Ivan was the sole pipeline technical artist on the production. Export scripts stayed configured. Art assets dropped into the build without argument. Nothing shipped over budget and nothing crashed the game. He was first in every morning and last out every night, and the team read that as dedication rather than a costume change.   At any point in production, twenty to thirty artists were generating hundreds of assets. To wrangle that, we ran a three depot flow. Art sources and references lived in the art source depot. Intermediate exchange files, FBX and PNG textures, lived in the staging depot. Designers pulled from staging into the build depot, where the engine picked them up. The build always had the latest assets. Staging always had the correct ones, sitting exactly where they were supposed to be. No artist ever lost a source file.   Ivan also studied Polish. Whenever he had a free moment, a lesson was running, and walking past his cubicle meant hearing Polish read aloud.   "Why are you studying Polish, Ivan?" I asked him.   "I think it's a really cool language," he replied.   Not quite convinced, I asked him again a week later.   "I have a couple of cousins who speak Polish. I thought it would be cool to talk with them in their own language."   I gave him the benefit of the doubt, right up until he dropped the bomb.   "I've got a dream opportunity at CD Projekt Red," he said. "Once in a lifetime shot. I'm leaving in two weeks."   We hustled as hard as we could and got a brain dump on everything we knew he was doing. There was a great amount of material. It was only the tip of the iceberg.   Two weeks after he left, we started to see what the cape had been covering. Assets went missing. The ones that reached the build without blowing up arrived slow and unoptimized. Reconditioning the pipelines to carry the work Ivan had been carrying after hours took the team almost six months.   Transitional boundaries between depots without named owners are rarely unowned. They get claimed, informally and unpaid, by whoever is least willing to live with a broken build. That person carries responsibilities nobody wrote down, and nobody covers them the day the person leaves.   Game teams run on exceptional people performing everyday acts of super-heroics. They are simply intolerant of lost, broken, and unoptimized assets, and they will do whatever it takes to deliver, including saving the day when nobody is watching.   Certain heroics buy clean builds and hide invoice at extreme cost. Learn how to identify and fortify the boundaries that demand a superhero, before the cape walks out the door, in my new book, Technical Artist Pipelines and Workflows, releasing late fall 2026.   Who is quietly holding your pipeline together, and what happens the day they start studying Polish?

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“If you strip all the genre debate down to what consistently works for indies, survival games keep coming up for a reason. Open-world survival and crafting isn't just popular on Steam right now, it aligns almost perfectly with what small and midsized teams can realistically build and support. Survival games sit in that sweet spot where systems do the heavy lifting. Instead of needing 30 or 40 hours of handcrafted content, they rely on mechanics, progression loops, and player-driven goals.”

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We've been implementing Neural Texture compression in #Assassinscreedmirage. The overall benefit results in better quality textures for less GPU memory usage (links in the first comment). If you followed the topic since our GDC2024 presentation ,this a very practical application of La Forge's mission to bridge the academic world with Ubisoft. #ubisoft #ubisoftlaforge #innovation 👇 "If you've been thinking, like I have, that we're still some way off seeing AI being used in games for more than just upscaling or frame generation, then it's time to think again" (...) "Enter stage left, neural texture compression to cut down on that memory demand. Given the state of the DRAM and SSD market right now, you can bet your last dollar that a whole heap of game developers will be looking closely at what Ubisoft has done to see if it can help out in their games, too"

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85% of game studios have dropped degree requirements. So why is it still so hard to find the right talent? 🧐 The truth is, removing a barrier is only half the battle. When you open the floodgates, you get more applicants, but not necessarily more *qualified* candidates. Without a degree as a filter, the burden falls on recruitment to identify "Maker DNA": the innate ability to solve problems and ship products. AI tools are flooding the market with generic resumes, making the search even harder. This is why "Surgical Recruitment" is no longer optional. You need a partner who knows how to spot a closer, with or without the diploma. Is your screening process overwhelmed? Let’s find the signal in the noise. #GameRecruiter #Hiring #GameDevelopment #RecruitmentLife #TechTalent

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