Undisclosed Project (Cancelled)

So after Watch_Dogs 2 shipped, I had a choice to make. Join another Ubisoft title in Toronto, or stay in Montréal on what was pitched as the next big open-world game. I chose Montréal. The project evolved fast. A major creative pivot, new technical targets, and a live-service direction that was very different from what they'd originally pitched.

The structure was complex. A distributed team across multiple geographies, 20+ people at peak. I wore three hats. Team Lead Programming (UI), PM, and CPI for UI, working alongside other CPIs, Production Managers, and Team Leads across art and the other disciplines. The central technical challenge was porting the entire UI from Flash to Ubisoft's new in-house UI framework. Honestly, that one had a clean, scalable architecture that beat Flash on every measure that mattered.

And we pulled the migration off in parallel with active game development, without affecting any other team or milestone. Completing it was recognized internally as a technical success, even though the project itself ended up cancelled later.

Honestly, the cancellation was about a lack of creative direction, not execution. I'd sensed it coming. A few months out, the deliverables were getting less and less realistic, and the conviction at the top was wavering. So the real work became human. I kept some of the team on the next project. Most got reassigned, and I've run into others at different studios since. And honestly, that's the thing about leading through a cancellation. You don't ship a game, but you ship the people, and the relationships outlast the org chart.