MotionSports
MotionSports is a game by Ubisoft that was released on November 2010 for the launch of Kinect. This is the first retail game on which I worked from start to finish. I assumed the role of Associate Producer for our team in Paris working on the Ski sport.
Before being Associate Producer on MotionSports I was Lead Gameplay Engineer in a gameplay R&D team in Ubisoft where we prototyped a lot with Kinect. About a year before the release date of Kinect Ubisoft decided to have another game part of the launch, a sports game. Marketing decided the best sports to add to the title and we then picked out some of the best prototypes from our R&D team to be used as a starting point.
In the end it was almost a true 100% top-down approach. The sports selected were: Soccer, American Football, Skiing, Boxing, Horse Riding and Hang Gliding. We had prototypes for skiing and something that resembled a hand gliding gameplay, but that was it.
Just Ship It
From there we had only about 9 months to make a Kinect launch title game. WiiSports is the license with the most sales of all times, so having a sports game at launch of Kinect was a good bet. But we just didn’t have enough time to make a good product.
Kinect is a fairly complicated piece of hardware. It’s a camera and microphone, it uses infrared lighting along with the RGB stream to build a depth map of its surrounding and then a human recognition SDK builds the skeleton of the person playing, with varying degrees of completeness and accuracy. The SDK was being updated every 3 weeks, new sensors every 3 months, and a high-level feature list changing every 6 months. We didn’t have two players support until a few months before launch. We had no engine in-house supporting Kinect.
We plugged everything we had from our research team into a Ubi engine, gave the lead of the project to Ubisoft Milan, and asked for the help of Ubisoft Barcelona who also had just finished their latest game. We ramped the production team up to 70 I think, with Milan doing 75% of the work. More than 150 people worked on the game to make it happen.
The gameplay engineers of our team toured the two other studios to make sure we all had a good understanding of the tech and how to design around it, and to assist with the development of all the prototypes.
For mini games with visible characters we had to develop a tech to properly animate them using the Kinect skeletons and blent it with baked animations to prevent artifacts. They were so many difficulties on top of each other, and very little time to make things right. We crunched for about 3 months.
Publishing
I helped direct two trailers, one for E3 and one for Gamescom, and I went to LA for a 3 days press tour with two other Ubisoft studios that were also shipping Kinect launch titles. We met major medias and presented the game with the help of local entertainers. It was great but our games were not finished or polished, it was difficult to really create interest.
Launch
In the end the game wasn’t very good, but it was working. Our studio in Paris was in charge of the Skiing game, and we’re proud of it. It has great control, two-players local co-op and different game modes. We had a good feeling of speed, nice graphics and you could throw snowball on your friend.
We certified the game on-time and shipped it. At the launch of Kinect they were 3 sports game:
Kinect Sports made by Microsoft & Rare (73 on Metacritics)
Motionsports, our game! (40 on Metacritics)
Deca Sport Freedom by Hudon (26 on Metacritics)
Overall we sold more than 700k units and Ubisoft even made some money out of it. But I guess the lesson is that you don’t make a Wii Sports in 9 months.
Sequel
A sequel was developed: MotionSports Adrenaline. They used my Kinect wingsuit prototype as one of the main gameplay. I was not aware of it until I saw the game at E3 the year later I think, I had left Ubisoft by then. It was a fun surprise :)