Sea of Thieves

About

“Sea of Thieves is a smash-hit pirate adventure game, offering the quintessential pirate experience of plundering lost treasures, intense battles, vanquishing sea monsters and more. Dive in with this revised edition of the game, which includes access to digital bonus media.” – Sea of Thieves Steam Page

Role

In my first role as a designer at Flix Interactive I was tasked with helping the team at Rare in the implementation of GAAS content for Sea of Thieves over several adventures starting on the 7th (The Sirens Prize) and worked on most up to the 12th as well as providing some support with the “Who Killed Demarco?” Mystery.

Eventually I began work on the The Legend of Monkey Island Tall Tales setting up quest chains, stepped interactions, conditional dialogue trees, character animations, and implementing new tech to the engine.

Responsibilities

• Highlighting potential issues within the initial design doc and helping find solutions.
• Breaking the work down in manageable tasks for tracking within ADO.
• Engaging with multiple disciplines to achieve the vision of the creative lead.
• Identifying common errors and documenting solutions to share with the rest of the team.
• Complete the work in a timely manor to maintain the release schedule as dictated by seasonal content and releases.
• Working with Engineers to implement, refine, and use new mechanics included as part of the various adventures.
• Creating dialogue trees.
• Implementing Layout for quest books.
• Presenting to leads the progress on the work.
• Designing combat encounters.

Contributions

As a Designer working with the team at Rare I was primarily tasked with implementation based on design documents and vision presentations given by our lead creative and as such I’ve worked with Christopher Davies, Steve Dillon, Nina Kim, and Mike Chapman in bringing their visions into the Sea of Thieves.

The Sirens’ Prize

Tackling this Adventure as my first role in the industry was incredibly daunting but a huge honour to be trusted by Flix Interactive to represent them in getting this done alongside Becky Hewitt, learning how their tale tech works with guidance from Rare engineers.

My particular areas of focus were the 3 shrines, placing the artefacts the players were sent to find, setting up the Ancient Priest NPC to give the player direction within the shrines, ambushing the player with combat encounters as they retrieved the artefacts, and linking the logic so that the shrines could be completed in any order.

My proudest addition to this adventure was the final combat encounter on top of Plunder Valley as the player tackles waves of Ghost pirates with the aide of the Ancient Warriors (first time Sea of Thieves saw NPCs fighting along side the player) until the final encounter of a Ghost Captain. Using the Tale Graph tech I was able to create an endless wave of pirates to support the captain alongside Ancient Warriors who hang around to aide the player for 20 seconds once the active waves were dispatched allowing the players to either focus fire the Captain whilst the Ancients handled the pirates or to aide the Ancients defeat the waves faster and handle the Captain.

I also setup additional combat encounters within the shrines which were ultimately descoped as it was disrupting the flow of the adventure.

Return of the Damned

My initial primary focus was the setup of the Sea Forts, investigating and understanding tech that had been implemented by a different outsourcing team that had since left the project. Eventually I was able to understand what controls we had on the forts and communicated with the engineering team what changes we would need to be able to swap out the sea fort spawner’s based on who was currently in control of the fort.

I also setup the random distribution of collectables for the adventure on the sea forts and the interaction dropped from the final fort captain that players could use to empower the relics they found there. Finally moving on to setup the instanced placement of the Servant of the Flame and liaising with the team at Rare to avoid issues of assets clashing or being overridden ahead of a future season that made some major changes to the island.

The Secret Wilds

Working closely with Christopher Davies, I worked with Rare’s VFX team to design the constellations based on the art provided by their team to work in a 3D manner so that they would only be triggered at the correct position and rotation unlike the previous 2D constellation puzzles. The mechanics for this wsas handled by the excellent engineers at Flix who had been brought on to support Rare engineering on Sea of Thieves projects, together we worked through various edge cases, server problems and game state considerations to ensure the adventure worked as intended every time.

Over the course of the adventure Captain Briggsy is brought into the world through the power found in the Sea of the Damned making memories a reality as she recounts her memories of finding the 3 artefacts. To help sell this I made sure to setup the constellation positions and her location in a manner that would drip feed the player this process, a in take of her breathe when they passed through a section of the Ancient Wilds brought to the material plain from memory, positioning of her ghostly apparition to be unmissable when she appeared through the mask, and increasing her opacity as the adventure progressed until the finale where she remains present as the player lowers the mask.

A Dark Deception

As we began prototyping the Tall Tale 2 of The Secret of Monkey Island content I was also helping to onboard one Flix’s newer designers passing on my knowledge of Tale graphs, dialogue setup, and supporting with advice for best approaches on this adventure that would lead into the Monkey Island announcement.

The Legend of Monkey Island

Being a child of the 90’s, hearing I would get to work on such an iconic brand was a dream come true.

The Quest for Guybrush

My initial involvement was in setting up prototype tale graphs on a test island and all the related assets to prove out the design flow and setting it up to be able to handle the open nature of the 3 trails to be completed to finish the adventure along side another Flix designer and working with Rare engineers to setup new tech for NPC’s wandering about their location.

Whilst we did this the art teams was building out Melee Island and when it started to come together we began bringing over the interactions to test of the tale as I would appear. Right away we identified an issue with the flow having the player performing several fetch quest up and down the main mountain to just complete the first Act and set off from it’s summit which made the experience drawn out in a tedious way. When Rare’s senior creative team came back with a change to the flow I took it upon myself to make sure it was implemented as intended as quickly as possible so we could refine it further.

In particular I took the time to animated the book interactions in the library, the placement of the ink well and quill and finally the animation of the quill signing Guy Brush’s signature on the blank credit note and also ensuring the map placement was randomised to give that element of replay ability to the Tale.

Along side this I setup the tale graphs to handle the Stan’s shipyard section of the island implementing the new Sequenced Interactions a Flix engineer had added to the engine working closely to refine it as we added conditional types, fail state messaged and return nodes to allow game state based interactions to give players conditional feedback based on the current game state. I also further stretched my animation wings by setup up the wobble of the machine and the roll of the bottle for the Grog (not Coke) vending machine before setting up the interaction sequence to trap Stan in a cupboard and push him into the bay.

I also worked closely with Animation to ensure all the sequences for the NPC’s in and around the town worked for the first and third act, included the grand finale as the player cure’s Guy Brush of his curse and ensured the dialogue trees all worked correctly based on game state.

Towards the end of the development I got some experience in debugging text issues with the translations identifying issue with our font types based on what tech was using it (simplified Chinese did not have a symbol for “TM” and would show tofu instead in dialogue trees). This was also the first implementation of voiced dialogue in the chat boxes with settings for controlling the animation type for each line.

The Lair of LeChuck

As each team wrapped on their Tale they would jump onto the next to help in setting it up, which proved beneficial with each Tale being bigger than the last. On this tale I initially help setup some of the interactions for the Captain Coco quest chain positioning spy glasses to direct a beam of sunlight around the island, revisiting my book interactions to setup cupboards full of “Captain Cronch” cereal to be searched to get his monocle and aided in positioning of several other key interactions.

Next I helped expand a section of the gameplay working with Nina Kim and Steve Dillon to bring the player a quest chain to follow clues which had different states once certain game states were reached and once more add an element of randomness to them to add to the replay ability.

Last of all I worked on solving some issues we were having with the final insult sword fight with LeChuck as the player moved through the town and spawning of the Sparkling Root Beer Seltzer to finally dispatch LeChuck including triggering and setting up the fireworks show to play during the ending dialogue sequence from Guybrush and Elaine.