Gaëtan Boulanger

so we're all ready to ship the game, first submission goes pretty well, and then The News The CEO's kid played the game and said it was boring and there was nothing to do in the game

so my lead comes to me and he says "so, we have to add a bunch of side activities into the game. we have a plan from patrice, but I'm not going to say yes unless you are in." I tell him to give me some time to think about it, and I go crank my music and have a nap at my desk

oh yeah I forgot the key part. he says "we have to put all these side missions into the game in five days, and they have to be bug free, because the build is going to be burned directly to disc and released to retail."

So anyway about an album later I lift my head and see him sitting there staring at me, just waiting for me to give him an answer. I say "Yes. But I have conditions." He says: "Anything"

So that's how myself and... 4? or 5? other people ended up in the main conference building of montreal's peck building, which is normally only accessible with a special door card. and it was only us who had access. no one else was allowed in. We had all our computers moved there.

Anyway, the rest of it is a blur, but I know that it went super well, because we did it. We managed to implement all of it in 5 days. And it was bug free... almost

If any of you poor folks ever tried to get the full 1000 gamer points on Assassin's Creed, you'd know there was one bug where sometimes you could never complete all the templar assassinations, and you'd have to restart your game to try again. I will now explain that bug.

So it turns out one of the templar were parented to the wrong sector. If you approached the templar from the wrong direction, he fell through the world and was despawned. Which didn't give you credit for the kill, but stored him into the savegame as dead. No more spawning.