Four years of my career were at Ubisoft, on Assassin’s Creed, on the Anvil Pipeline team — the part of the studio that builds the tools and infrastructure the rest of the development teams use, not the gameplay players see directly.

My biggest project there was the RankInfo migration: a legacy system rewritten into a modular, data-driven architecture, with its own descriptor tags and an adapter pattern for backward compatibility. I also built a migration driver that mapped the old code to the new one, plus internal ImGui tooling for the teams using the system daily. The kind of work that never shows up in a trailer, but without which the rest of the game doesn’t get built.

At some point the team reorganized — Anvil Pipeline split, with part of the work moving to Vantage Studios. The kind of restructuring the games industry keeps going through, not something specific to me. In the middle of that transition I worked briefly on Assassin’s Creed Hexe, where I shipped Pressure Plates — a complete mechanic, from zero to working, in about a week.

That week stuck with me more than I expected. Not because it was easy, but because I noticed something about how I work best: under a clear external deadline, with a concrete result at the end, I produce. It’s not the first time I’ve noticed this pattern. Cindy’s Adventures — my solo entry for the Game Off 2021 jam — was built entirely in a month, with the jam’s rules as the only deadline, and it shipped finished. Same with EvoAgents, my bachelor’s thesis on behavior trees for NPC AI: a fixed academic deadline, a clear deliverable, seen through to the end.

My projects without an external deadline? Most of them stayed good ideas on paper. That’s not a coincidence, it’s a pattern.

I can’t say the pivot to backend and infrastructure was a clean, planned choice from the start — part of that path was decided by context, not by me. But the reasons infrastructure fits me stay real regardless of how I got here: clear ownership, a system that either works or doesn’t, a feedback loop I control, not a creative committee.

That doesn’t mean gaming stopped mattering to me. Cindy’s Adventures, EvoAgents, four years of AAA production on Assassin’s Creed — those aren’t just old lines on a résumé, they’re proof that I’m already a game developer, not just someone curious about gaming. I don’t have a clean conclusion about where that goes, and I don’t think I need one right now. What I do have is a clear pattern for how I work best — under an external deadline, with a concrete deliverable — and things that genuinely interest me, regardless of which professional label sits on top of them.

Sovereign AI Nexus is the next portfolio project built on that logic. It’s probably not the last, and it’s probably not the only kind of project you’ll see here.

I’m not ruling out, at some point, a separate series about game development directly — an engine built from scratch, an Assassin’s Creed feature rebuilt in an evening, whatever else keeps me in that space. It doesn’t have to be either/or. There’s room here for both.