Arena Battle Champions

So Arena Battle Champions was my first real director role. A small, sharp engineering team. 6 programmers in a compact polyvalent structure, a technical architect, multi-trade programmers (game designer / gameplay programmer hybrids), plus AI R&D with Eidos Sherbrooke using ML/RL to make the bots feel genuinely human. About 30 people total across all disciplines. And it was fully remote.

Honestly, the interesting tech was the rollback multiplayer netcode. Decoupling the game tick from the render so we could roll back state whenever we needed to. It scaled really well as long as there were servers near each region. Latency, as always, was the silent killer of the experience. My role was high-level technical direction. Making sure the game could scale worldwide, planning budgets for every piece of tech we needed, negotiating third-party deals with partners like Photon (with legal, SLAs, commercial terms), and doing prediction and scalability planning. And a lot of my week was also one-on-ones. Careers matter.

ABC shipped regionally, not worldwide, before the studio was shut down in November 2022. The studio had rebranded from Square Enix Montréal to Studio Onoma in 2021, ahead of the closure. Honestly, directing through that arc taught me a lot. About keeping a team focused on craft while the org around them shifts, and about being honest with people, early, when things start to move.