Women of Ubisoft – Anne Wuebbenhorst

In a way, Anne Wuebbenhorst arrived at Ubisoft because of love. In 2014, the now 29-year-old German gameplay programmer left a job in New Zealand and moved to France to be closer to her boyfriend. After the move, she applied for a job at Ubisoft Paris as a gameplay programmer working on Just Dance and has been with the studio for the past four years.

Wuebbenhorst's love for gaming began at age eight when her father bought her and her younger sister a Nintendo 64. Growing up playing 3D platforming games, she is now a huge fan of the Rayman series, but admits that her favorite Ubisoft game remains Beyond Good and Evil. Wuebbenhorst knew she wanted to make video games from the age of 16, when she and her younger sister were playing Star Fox Adventures on GameCube. Her passion for games led her to study computer games technology at university in Scotland.

**What does a typical workday look like for a gameplay programmer? **

AW: That really depends on the phase. We have multiple phases that any game goes through: pre-production, production, debug. In pre-production, we try out new things, because we don't have to make things clean and polished. Or, we know what big new feature we're going to try to do, and we have to figure out how to make it happen and what new code we need to design for it.

In production, you expand on your ideas, see what's possible and what isn't and lock everything down, and in our case we build out the user interface for Just Dance as well. In the Debug phase, there's a lot of testing and we fix all the mishaps and possible exploits.

**With so many different aspects to the job, what would you say is your favorite? **

AW: I like to design a new big feature; it's like magic. You make something new out of nothing. It's one of the things I really like. For example, we made a new adventure mode for Just Dance, and I had to design all of that. It was really fun; you have to think about the data structure and what the designers might want to include, where I want them to be flexible or not flexible. You design the logic and you can make the rules.

**What is one thing about game development that people outside of the industry might not know? **

AW: I don't think anyone outside of games understands my job (laughs). We don't play games all day, and even when we are playing and testing games, it's not as fun as when you're playing a finished game. You're playing it to see if it's broken or not.

People also really underestimate how much work goes into making a game. There are so many different parts that have to work together. If you want the whole game to work well, you need every aspect of it to work well together.

**How do you feel about the gender disparity in the games industry? **

AW: Well, since high school, when I studied computer science, I was the only girl in my major. In Just Dance, however, there are a lot more women on the production team. I think we definitely have more women than most games. I am far from the only woman on my team now.

Do you think it's important to have representation of multiple genders in games?

AW: The reason I really liked Beyond Good and Evil was because the main character was a woman. I looked at Jade and thought, "Yay, it's me!" I don't look like her at all, but it immediately made me feel like it was a game for me because there was a female protagonist. It wasn't a watered-down game or anything; it was a game that even my dad wanted to play. I'm not sure if I would've been as excited for it if it had a male protagonist; the game still would've been great, but the fact that I could play as a girl really elevated it for me.

**What's the best advice you've ever been given? **

AW: In general, never change yourself to make others like you. My mother used to tell me that all the time when I was young. There's a German expression that says, "Don't bend your back to make others like you." It means to stick to your integrity, and don't change for other people. It was really important for me growing up; it made me stick with hobbies that I might have abandoned otherwise. I was reading manga in Germany at 16, which wasn't really culturally acceptable, but I was OK with being different, because my mother taught me that it's OK to be different.

Professionally, I think the best advice I've received is to try and find something that can really frustrate you, but makes you still want to continue doing it. Once, when I was at university, we had to draw storyboards, and it was so frustrating and I couldn't get it right. I didn't want to draw again for a long time. I don't have that feeling with programming. Even when I'm working on a problem for three days, I know that if I just stick with it, I can figure it out. That can be true for something like drawing as well, but with programming, I want to stick with it. You should always look for a job that makes you want to persevere through the frustration.

**What advice would you give to a young woman who wants to be a gameplay programmer? **

AW: Don't think you're stupid. Don't think that everyone is better than you, because it's not true. I always thought everyone else was smarter and that I was the only one who didn't understand something, but odds are that if you don't understand something, other people in the room don't understand either. They're just not saying it.

**Have you had to overcome any challenges throughout your career? **

AW: At university, I applied to a competition for a recruiting company specifically for games. They had us try to make a game in a week. It was in C++, which I had used before, but it was also using DirectX, and in school we had only been taught OpenGL. So I had to make a game using a graphics engine I didn't know. The results were fine, because I made it into the top three, but there were many moments where I felt like cracking under the pressure because I couldn't figure out my problems in DirectX. I had two breakdowns when I called my mom (laughs). I was thinking, "I'll never finish this, I'm such a bad programmer," but in the end it was fine.

**What accomplishments are you most proud of? **

AW: In Just Dance 2016, we added a streaming service, Just Dance Unlimited. You can play maps that aren't on the disc but that are streamed from a server. I was one of the core people making it. I'm really proud of it, because it's a huge part of Just Dance now. You can't have Just Dance without Just Dance Unlimited, and I was an integral part in making it happen.