The Making Of...
Ubisoft Reflections discusses the art of noise and the pursuit of joy in musical platformer Ode
There’s a harmonious magic in Ode’s landscapes. Its alien worlds, peculiar yet welcoming, double as giant, organic musical instruments, with flowers, strange growths and springy fungi becoming valves, frets and keys in a spontaneous, experimental performance. As a fallen star, you barrel around, drawn to tiny spheres that trail behind you once collected, ready to be cast out and gathered back up in an instant. Almost imperceptibly, the soundtrack builds with your own momentum until it reaches a rousing crescendo, a euphoric conclusion to your orchestral manoeuvres.
Like each of its stages, Ode gradually developed from modest beginnings. It’s a surprise, in fact, to discover that it all started with a simple piece of technology, created by one of Ubisoft Reflections’ programmers. “We had this concept, which was essentially what you see now as bubbles forming and taking shapes,” lead designer Dale Scullion tells us. “It was inherently fun and tactile to play with and so that led us to think we should try to do something with it.”
It’s less of a shock to learn that the studio’s principal aim was to capture a feeling of joy through curious exploration. But how to express that concept? As producer Anne Langourieux explains, it took some time to get right. “We spent approximately a year in conception,” she says – twice as long as the game was actually in production. “We wanted to solidify the pillars we identified in that initial prototype, and work on how to transcribe joy in the visual and the musical elements of the experience. All this took a lot of time. But then we knew what we had to do in production so it went quickly after that.”
Capturing a feeling of joy – and focusing exclusively on doing so with every element of the game – proved to be a significant challenge, but once Reflections had established that music would play a key role, things slowly began to take shape. The process was holistic: the level design, the sounds and the visuals would each inform one another. “For every level we had an idea of the kind of emotion that we wanted to bring, and this was the foundation,” Scullion says. “We could then go away and look at the type of music that would support this, and while doing that we’d look at the visuals and marry them up as we progressed.”
For Romain His, who was in charge of Ode’s sound and music, the length of the conceptual stage helped him tie everything together. “We developed this huge system in which music acts as a game design, animation and visual effects ingredient in itself,” he says. “It’s something that really brings life into the river.” In other words, making the level feel like
“WE HAD THIS CONCEPT, WHICH WAS ESSENTIALLY WHAT YOU SEE NOW AS BUBBLES TAKING SHAPES”
it flowed organically required plenty of methodical planning in the first instance: you mightn’t associate that kind of careful organisation with the feeling of spontaneity you get from Ode, but it was absolutely necessary, His insists. “You have to think about what kind of signal you want to drive into each of the plants, the animations, the visual effects,” he continues. “Once we had all these little links, we could complete the music in a way that would bring life to an entire level.”
If emotional feelings were to be the heart of the game, Reflections knew it had to work hard on the physical side. Your spherical avatar bowls around in a way that’s reminiscent of AiAi from Super Monkey Ball with the gathering momentum of a katamari. It feels, we suggest, almost like you’re guiding a toddler: there’s a strangely irresistible sense of being ever-soslightly out of control, as if your avatar’s body can’t quite keep up with their brain. You can just about steer them where you want to go – indeed, it gets easier to adjust to their impetus over time – but on occasion you’ll end up careering between rocks and hard places, saved only by your translucent, gelatinous shell. “Well, that’s exactly the kind of feel we were going for,” says a delighted Scullion. “And because you can go from what is essentially a single ball to, like, 400, we wanted to mimic that feeling of – well, I guess it’s almost crowdlike? But at the same time keep a level of control in there, so that the player is never not going to be able to do anything that they want to do.”
“This idea of a kind of subliminal presence of a toddler is interesting,” His adds. “Because kids and toddlers came across as inspirations all the way through development.” Ode’s abstract nature was purposely designed to allow players room for their own personal interpretations of what it all means. For His, it became the story of a toddler that had lost their marbles in the playground. Langourieux recalls a playtester who came up with a very different reading. “They told us this story of a kid who had lost his sight and was finding it gradually,” she says, the sounds helping the child navigate the world.
The almost-total absence of a narrative (beyond a brief intro) was part of a desire to keep Ode as accessible as possible to a broad audience. If the protagonist’s inertia means you might make a mistake, whether it’s missing a single star piece on a high platform, or bouncing into a river and briefly losing your collection, there’s very little frustration associated with such slips. This is a game with no threat, nor any punishment for failure: mess up, and you can simply try again. “We were very keen to make a game that was just pure exploration,” art director Jack Couvela says – and that purity extended to leaving out a tutorial and in-game prompts of any kind. He pays warm tribute to level designer Liam Charlton’s efforts in subtly guiding the player. “Liam put in a lot of work to make sure that the player felt a natural sense of exploration and would find their way around while being tempted towards different routes.”
For Couvela’s part, it was vital to find an artistic balance between a place that was at once dark and strange, yet also enticing. “We wanted a contrast between the beginning and the end of the level, but we also wanted it to
feel appealing and non-threatening,” he says.
Ode’s controls were a key factor in ensuring players never felt overwhelmed, even given the lack of any traditional guidance. “We wanted people to explore and even experiment with the controller, while the first level teases the player into understanding what the game is,” Scullion adds. “So we went through a lot of prototypes and playtesting to make sure that we never lost players with any kind of complex interactions.”
In the meantime, Langourieux had encouraged His to travel from his home in Paris to Newcastle for live sessions with the rest of the team. Bringing his guitar, drum machine and portable studio with him, His was kindly loaned a keyboard by another Reflections staffer, helping him to nail the mood of each stage. He would return to his hotel room each evening with directional notes on identifying tones for the world’s plants and fungi, working late before bringing back the results to show everyone the following day. Such a collaborative process, he says, was hard work but creatively invigorating. “It was an experiment gone right!” he laughs, “And completely different from composing music abstractly, because you’re creating a life form – feeding and populating a world. I think what was really important is that it was a very open process: there were a lot of ideas, and it was not just for me to decide, it was up to everybody.”
Reflections may have had plenty of ideas to choose from, but the team’s keenness to distil the game down to only its most essential elements meant that plenty were thrown out. Concepts for the game’s various transformations – power-ups, after a fashion – were plentiful, but less than a handful made the final cut. None of them, Scullion admits, have an official name: a sticky, tube-like form that attaches itself onto rocky steps, flipping over itself to climb them, was known as both The Thing and The Slinky. “We tested a lot to see the kind of feeling they brought and basically reduced them to the three or four best, and we picked those based on the emotions we wanted to bring,” Scullion adds. “And from there we crafted the level around them, so they were basically a big part of the foundations of the level design.”
As meticulously planned as everything was, there were a few eleventh-hour changes. Joy, the feeling, may have been there from the beginning, but Joy, the protagonist, certainly wasn’t. “She didn’t appear until three weeks before release,” Couvela concedes, and everyone laughs. “For a long time we didn’t have one of the balls marked out as special; you would just become one of the pack if you were down to a single entity. Eventually we realised that it was much better for the gameplay and for the controls to know where you were pointing by having a specific one that was different.” Couvela had already animated a hamster in a ball as an Easter egg of sorts, but the result was so popular that the team realised the player’s avatar needed more personality. And so, eventually, Joy was born.
Her belated arrival came just a week after a decision was made to add a bonus level. Reflections had learned that Ode would be out before Christmas, and decided an extra themed stage was the ideal way to celebrate. “We felt that the game was a little gift of joy, and we wanted to extend that to be part of the holiday gift-giving season.” Couvela says. With everyone else on the team already occupied, three new staffers were invited to develop the stage, which in many respects is antithetical to the approach of the rest of the game: it has collectibles, enemies and is set against the clock. “We didn’t want to scare them with crazy pressure because this wasn’t something that we had to include,” he continues. “But we set them this challenge to theme a level that we could then decide whether or not we wanted to include.” Happily, the risk paid off: a surprise bonus for players was a proud moment for a trio of initiates. “One month into their job at Ubisoft and they’ve already got a game under their belts,” Couvela smiles.
If that was something of a baptism of fire for Reflections’ newest`recruits, the process of making Ode taught even its more experienced developers a thing or two to take into their next project. “For me it was about focusing on the purity of the central idea of the game and really questioning every aspect of the design to make sure it fits,” Scullion begins, before Couvela enthusiastically interjects. “Yeah, it’s the hardest thing. I think that’s partly why proportionately we spent a very long time in concept with this game – a lot of that was struggling with what we could and couldn’t take out. For ages, we explored very different types of games and very different approaches, and all of them were a lot more complicated and layered and detailed than Ode ended up. But I’m very happy that we ended up with such a pure little gem.”
Even so, we venture, there’s surely more mileage in Ode: Grow Home eventually got a sequel in Grow Up, after all. “We should do an Ode with PJ Harvey,” says Langourieux, seemingly only half-joking. “Actually, why not?” His says, suggesting that a level with a bluesrock flavour would be his preferred choice. “We’re always exploring new ideas so hopefully we’ll have things to announce,” Langourieux teases. Finding the right one might take time, but if Ode is anything to go by, the results will be joyous indeed.