THE FATHER OF THE ISU LANGUAGE

The Isu Language is the creation of Antoine Henry, former Associate Game Director at Ubisoft Singapore.

Antoine worked for Ubisoft for 14 years on different games: while working at Ubisoft's Paris Studio, he was involved as Game Designer on the Rabbids, Just Dance and Watch Dogs brands. In 2014 he moved from Paris to Singapore and he faced his first project as Lead Game Designer for Skull & Bones.

He never had a chance to work on an Assassin's Creed title up until Assassin's Creed Valhalla in 2018 for which he perfomed the role of Associate Game Director, responsible for all the features developed by the Singapore, Chengdu and Philippines studios.

In 2021 he left Ubisoft to join Riot Games as Senior Manager for game design.


HOW WAS THE LANGUAGE BORN?

Antoine has always been very passionate about languages and one day, while flying home from Russia, he found a link to "The Language Construction Kit" by Mark Rosenfelder (a simplified manual for the creation of a language) and he got enthusiastic about the process and started creating languages both as a hobby and professionally.
Two of the languages he worked on before the chance of landing on the Assassin's Creed brand were Yecht Fradí for Greedfall and another for Curse of the Dead Gods by Passtech Games.

During the development of Assassin's Creed Valhalla, one night, when he was in Montreal for a series of internal workshops, he went to a pub with Narrative Director Darby McDevitt and while talking about his passion for languages, Darby suggested how great of an idea would be to have a proper language for the Isu Civilization. From there onward, they started working on the language as you know it today, with all the riddles and texts that can be found in the game.

Now, as we said, Antoine is not working at Ubisoft anymore but if you feel like following him, you can find him on Twitter.

In the following video, you will be able to find the interview we recorded with him in 2021.

Enjoy!

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