But even with the right talent in-house, it was a long road, Severin tells us: “It was a huge process of iteration and development. Going from that simple one with wires and tape, we moved to getting a 3D printer on the team and actually starting to 3D print things and after doing cycles of those, you run up against the limits of the 3D printer. So we’d get even better 3D printers and then eventually working with industrial model shops, who do these very professional results.”
Pictured above: Team lead programmer Matthew Severin
GAME, SET, MATCH With all that fancy technology, and with toys-to-life titles being something of a rarity these days, it’s all too easy to forget that there’s a video game alongside all this. And trying to make both together had its challenges – most obviously notable in Starlink’s relatively lengthy five-year gestation. We wonder to what extent the two aspects, toy and game, sat happily side-by-side in production? “There were certainly discrete phases and certain phases where you have to make decisions which are irrevocable and you can’t come back from,” Severin says.
For example, once you’ve settled on a weapon, designed the toy for it, prototyped that in plastic, then it’s not quite so easy to completely change tack later. The art team in particular was heavily impacted by the project’s dual-nature. “It was a hugely interesting challenge for the art team. In games you can essentially make anything you want, but for us all these pieces actually have to work as real objects,” Severin says. And then the game itself had its own challenges. Ubisoft Toronto hadn’t compromised on its ambition for the game just because it had a complex toy element. The key Severin tells us was “being a space explorer, being able to travel seamlessly from planet to planet and around these planets.” And those planets created a challenge for Ubisoft’s Snowdrop engine: “We’ve got these spherical planets, which is a difficult challenge in and of itself. Most games exist on a flat plane, but these are actually round, so a bullet travelling is going to leave the atmosphere, and the AI needs to behave on the sphere in a logical way.”
“The very first prototype, me and a couple of other people on the team whipped it up out of construction blocks and an off-the-shelf circuit board. It was stuck together with tape and hot glue with wires sticking out, and we did it in an afternoon, and we built a simple game that went along with it.”
60 | MCV 940 October 2018