Our team at Ubisoft Toronto is passionate about helping emerging talent learn how to make games. We love the opportunity to connect with more students in the province – you may have seen us at Hack the North last fall, and we kicked off 2020 by participating in SheHacks IV in London, Ontario.
On January 11th and 12th, four Ubisoft Toronto gameplay and AI programmers brought the Ubisoft Hackers Nest API challenge to SheHacks IV. The fourth iteration of Canada’s first all-female 24 hour hackathon drew 300 woman-identifying students across North America. Hosted by the Women in Technology Society at Western University, SheHacks’ focus is to prepare women to thrive in the technology industry.
Under the guidance of Ubisoft Toronto programmers Claire Girvin, Radek Malicki, Ramon Viladomat, and Susie Su — and a few members of our campus team — multiple SheHacks teams took the Ubisoft challenge this weekend in which they created a game with our API in just 24 hours.
The Winners
Congratulations to Nancy Zhao, Nicole Karas, Yu Jie (Linda) Jiang, and Michelle Luo for making the weekend’s winning game. Their team created Financial Blitz, a true / false game that quizzes players on their financial literacy. In Financial Blitz, players have one minute to answer as many questions as possible, and are rewarded one point per correct answer. The game addressed issues of debt, which many students face after finishing their degrees, and raises awareness of the importance that financial responsibility plays in their futures.
Our Ubisoft team felt that this game was well-executed, complete, ran smoothly during the demo, and featured appropriately challenging financial questions — they even learned a few financial facts themselves!
Other great games created that weekend include:
- Flare, a maze game that promotes wildfires safety and emergency preparedness, inspired by the current Australian bushfires.
- FireForest, where the player is a koala navigating through fires (also inspired by news from Australia), and aims to educate players on climate change and the molecular structure of carbon dioxide.
- Quiz Mee, a trivia game modeled after the SheHacks booths. Players approach different booths and answer questions about the organization.
Congratulations to everyone who participated this weekend, and to SheHacks for having us. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram to see where our campus team will be next, and check out our Students Page to learn more about our student and recent graduate initiatives.
