- Ubisoft's Steven Masters suggests that game designers should serve as shepherds and guides for their teams, rather than as domineering auteurs. Ubisoft's Steven Masters took the stage during GDC Europe 2013 to deliver an insightful presentation on a simple topic: how do you approach the practical challenges of building an Assassin's Creed game, from a designer's perspective? Given his role as a lead game designer at Ubisoft Montreal, Masters focused the talk on the strategy, methodologies and philosophy underpinning the studio's work on Assassin's Creed III. The game took three years to make and hit a peak team size of several hundred people, and throughout his talk Masters explains how the studio went about organizing that process, ranking the game's proposed features and extracting remarkable utility from a rigorous series of playtests. It's a talk worth watching for all game developers, especially those working as designers at large-scale studios, so we've gone ahead and embedded the free video of "Designing Assassin's Creed III" above. You can also watch it here on the GDC Vault.

About the GDC Vault

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