The Making Of . . . ODE

Reflections on the art of noise and the pursuit of joy

- Chris Schilling

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.”