Nathalie Dubois

After spending four years working on Assassin’s Creed, Nathalie is preparing the sequel as Presentation Lead Programmer, raising the bar of what players will expect for future current gen games.

Equipped with a Computer Engineering degree from École Polytechnique de Montréal, she started working at Ubisoft Montréal as a Tools Programmer in 1999, developing a data editing pipeline used for numerous PlayStation 2 and GameCube games. Two years later, she had the chance to join an incredibly talented team that was creating one of the studio’s masterpieces – Prince of Persia: The Sands of Times. On this title, she worked as a Generalist Programmer, improving the engine’s animation system to permit synchronous, asynchronous and partial animation blending, and basic inverse kinematics, which gave the fluidity we all know the Prince is capable of. Having a natural sense of presentation and polishing, she also developed a light UI system, and worked on savegames and localization for Asian versions. She also gave a hand in shipping the famous sequel: Warrior Within.

She then followed the POP: SOT core team to work on Assassin’s Creed and create a brand new in-house engine. As Tools Programmer, she developed the first tools for the engine, using a very particular data flow. Nowadays, her tools and 3DS MAX plug-ins are used by several hundreds of artists throughout the worldwide company and she is still an internal reference regarding the 3DS MAX SDK!

Feeling she wanted to have more impact on the project, she switched to Presentation Programmer and implemented most of the functionalities for the techno-style UI. Following up work on the Director’s Cut Edition, she rejoined the same core team to work on Assassin’s Creed 2.

In her leisure time, Nathalie enjoys playing erhu and practicing kung fu.