Fable

So Fable was Playground Games's project. Eidos-Montréal was brought in as a co-dev partner, and that collaboration was announced publicly in 2024. I led the Eidos-MTL side, 12 programmers across every trade. Generalist, gameplay, AI, engine, animation, rendering. Most systems sat under Playground's supervision because they owned the engine expertise, so our job was to integrate cleanly into their architecture while keeping our team growing and resilient.

Playground Games is based in the UK, which is a 5-hour difference from Montréal, and that made every touchpoint deliberate. Async-first communication, tight written discipline, carefully structured overlap windows, and genuine cross-studio relationship-building became as important as the technical work itself. Mind you, you can't just walk down the hall when a decision has to get made. What made the cadence work was a few things. Regular syncs with their engineering team, honest and transparent collaboration, and a shared willingness to try, fail, and learn. When something didn't work, we surfaced it. Honestly, that's the only way cross-studio collab survives the time-zone tax.

Honestly, the thing I'm most proud of is this. We delivered the full mandate with zero attrition on the talent we cared about. Every key engineer we built up on Fable is still at Eidos today, working on the next project. The game ships, the team continues, that's the real win. Fable was also a discipline-focus shift for me. Coming off multi-discipline engineering leadership at Studio Onoma (gameplay, backend, AI, UI, tooling, graphics), I narrowed in on gameplay and AI inside an AAA cross-studio collaboration. And it reinforced my conviction that distributed leadership isn't a limitation. It's a skill that builds up with practice.