100 All Time Favorites, a console title developed by Ubisoft Pune for Nintendo DS has been recently launched in the US and UK. The Pune facility of Ubisoft which was set up in May 2008 after the acquisition of Gameloft Pune has done the complete end to end production for the game over the last one and a half year, which also happens to be its first in-house console title. The game is localized in five major languages namely English, French, Italian, German and Spanish and the US and UK launch will be followed by the EMEA launch.

The game is a collection of 100 casual classic games and one can choose among a great variety of board games, card games and puzzles and have fun with family and friends or simply take a moment to have fun and relax while playing alone.

Talking to GamingXpress, Jithin Rao, Producer, Ubisoft Pune shared, “100 All Time Favorites is the first step for us. We want to climb up the ladder but slowly, effectively and efficiently. I think this is the first officially Nintendo licensed title created by an Indian team to be released in the international markets.”

The game is built on Ubisoft’s in-house game engine Onyx, developed by Ubisoft Quebec. It’s the very same engine that has been used for most of the Ubisoft projects on DS produced till date. The development team had extended the engine a bit on the memory constraints and the networking to adapt to the needs of the game.

Ubisoft Pune was a newly acquired studio when the project started. Initially the concept of 100 All-time Favorites was proposed as a training project for the studio by the Head Quarters for casual games of Ubisoft, named as Games for Everyone (G4E). The development team consisted of a newly joined design group with experienced programmers and artists. Once they had a playable prototype, the development team along with G4E team saw a lot of promise in it and the training project got converted to a real time project.

The production team was already experienced in touch screen devices before coming to Ubisoft, so the team saw great potential in the DS platform to kick off proceedings. Once the team had a couple of PC prototypes running smoothly with the Onyx, the team achieved the confidence and expertise to work on the platforms that Onyx supported and that's where the production of "100 All Time Favorites" was flagged off.

The average game play of the game is of 45+ hours, it can be longer if you are a more strategy based player on games like chess, Chinese checkers etc. 45+ hours were needed by 9 member QC team each to complete a walk cycle, which would be an average for a 12-35 year old.

The key features of the game include a wide selection of easy to pick up classic games including over 100 board games, card games and puzzles. The list of games include Battleship, Poker, Sudoku, Chess, Checkers, Dominoes, Black Jack, Bridge, Jackpot, Connect 5, Solitaire, Pool, Bowling and many more.

Beginners can watch tutorial videos to learn and play new games and develop strategies and reflexes with the new Classroom Games feature and follow progression based on learning curves. Gamers can beat the clock and set high scores, the higher score you get, the more games you can unlock and the more challenging it becomes. As you go through the game you get points and credits that you can use to unlock even more rewards and you can challenge your family and friends with the multiplayer mode, which has up to 6 players.

Talking about the development team at Ubisoft, Jithin said, “We had a huge team for Nintendo DS, working on this project. The idea of having a huge team was to train everyone as quickly as possible in their own respective domains. Since it was a very new team and new technology, this project had been a challenge for everyone.”

It was a 32 member team at production peak level. The development team consisted of 4 members in the design team, 19 members in the programming team and 4 members in the artist team. Jitesh Panchal, Lead Game Designer said, "It's always tough designing a compilation, then a board and card game compilation is way beyond imagination. I really believe that my creative team did a great job with the scope." For the design, it was quite a junior team and so communication and team work were really important. The challenge was to teach board and card games to a player via a cartridge with lesser text in an innovative way and with a practical approach which took the team a lot of play tests to exactly understand whether what they wanted to convey to the player was told or not.

Coming to programming, it was a huge shift of Java programmers to C++, which the guys coped up with really quickly and of course the extensions on the engine part, show that they did do their part really well. "The learning experience has been with a lot of ups and downs. Eventually, it was a great journey with minor victories and working around major roadblocks with great team work," said Ankit Dutt Mathur, Lead Programmer, Ubisoft Pune.

Team of Ubisoft Pune

Jithin added, “The team was made up of people who were new but had experience in small screen devices. At the beginning it seemed a bit out of memory, but eventually we could see that they got it more perfect than we thought they could.” To which Luell Lopez, Art Director of the game added, "Accommodating a lot of games on the same art direction was a tough job. It was the highly experienced artists from various platforms like mobile and flash who helped us to unify the compilation and provided the vision of the core team with quality."

The other Ubisoft facilities assisted the Pune team and each department had a minimum of 2-3 expatriates experienced in their domain, coming down to Pune. They spent 2-4 months with the development team on various parts of production and helped them to solve the hiccups in production. The Ubisoft work flow helped the team to finish the game in eight months. David Blanchard, Studio Managing Director said "I’m very proud of the work provided by Jithin’s team, who has delivered a very solid game with an impressive scope. I actually believe this game can really find its place on the market and prove to be an excellent surprise. After this great first step, I feel very confident about the coming and more ambitious games that the team is currently working on."

The successful launch of this game must have surely given the Pune based studio confidence to undertake even bigger projects and move to the next gen consoles as well. This shows that there are opportunities for Indian game developers to showcase their talents on a larger scale through the exposure that Ubisoft has provided.