Sea of Thieves

Sea of Thieves is a pirate action-adventure game created by Rare, since its release it has been continuously supported as a Games as a service product.

My Role

During my time working on the Sea of Thieves I was part of the embedded test team, a small internal test team that was responsible for maintaining the health and stability of the game, as part of this test team I was given test ownership over a number of different features and releases, these included one of the three ‘The Legend of Monkey Island” tall tales and the evolution of one of the main port towns in the game. My role was to work with our internal and external development partners to ensure that these features were released to the high-quality standard expected for the game, alongside these main features I also had a number of other tasks and processes to follow on a daily/weekly basis to ensure the continued stability and quality of the game.

While working on the project, some of my tasks involved:

  • Attending/running daily test stand up meetings.

  • Working towards continuous deadlines with monthly releases as a Games as a Service product.

  • Identifying, logging and working with live incidents within the retail environment.

  • Identifying any internal issues that could disrupt the testing process and raising outage issues (e.g. build failures).

  • Working with and reviewing internal statistics to monitor the health of the retail environment and correctly flagging any issues.

  • Ensuring that known issues are logged with the correct severity and the correct teams are notified if necessary (e.g. build blocking issues).

  • Reviewing and working with feedback and issues raised from the insider’s program and customer support tickets.

  • Working daily with external development partners.

  • Working daily with our external test partners.

  • Using internal tools to create information for release (e.g. patch release notes).

  • Reviewing automated screenshot tests

  • Taking part in project wide retrospectives

The Legend of Monkey Island : The Quest for Guybrush

The Legend of Monkey Island is a 3-part narrative focused tall tale adventure based on the Monkey Island series of video games, The Quest for Guybrush is the 2nd tale of the 3.

During the development of The Quest for Guybrush my role was to take ownership of the project from the testing side, this was the biggest project that I had been given ownership of while working on the Sea of Thieves, however I was able to take the experience from my previous work on the game and transfer that onto this project. This project came with a lot of its own challenges because we would be creating so much new stuff in the game, while also working with an external partners IP, this meant it was incredibly important that the correct care and testing was taken to not only reach our own levels of quality, but those expected by us from the IP holders too. It was an incredible learning experience and something that I’m incredibly grateful I was trusted to take test ownership of.

During the development of ‘The Quest for Guybrush’ my role consisted of some of the following tasks:

  • Ensuring that care is taken when working with an external partners IP and the quality level expected by both parties is met.

  • Ensuring the stability and quality of builds being sent out to the IP holders bi-weekly.

  • Creating and Updating walkthrough documentation to be sent out with review builds.

  • Being a part of development from the prototype stages and providing feedback throughout development on not just quality, but other aspects such as Games Design.

  • Working daily with our internal and external development team.

  • Attending daily stand-up meetings.

  • Attending weekly review meetings.

  • Daily use of Azure DevOps to submit, track and verify bugs.

  • Creating test sheets/documentation to track the state of the project that can easily be understood by production.

  • Working with the insider’s program and the feedback gathered from it.

  • Creating verification tasks for the external test team.

Port Merrick

During one of our time limited adventures, Adventure 4 (The Lost Sands) players were given a choice, deliver the supplies needed to rebuild Golden Sands Outpost or ensure it remains destroyed. The community decided they want to help rebuild the outpost and as a result Port Merrick was created.

During the development of Port Merrick, I was tasked with leading the testing for the project and due to the Sea of Thieves being a GaaS title, this meant the project consisted of monthly update releases over a 7-month period, which brought along its own unique challenges and learning experiences. As Ports are a major landmark in the Sea of Thieves, it was important to ensure that during the development of Port Merrick, the level of quality and functionality was maintained, and players were not affected by any changes that were being made during that time.

During the development of Port Merrick my role consisted of the following:

  • Attending weekly stand-up meetings.

  • Showcase the current state of the project in weekly review meetings.

  • Ensuring that while a work in progress feature, monthly releases for the game were still present and the quality bar we set for the game had to be maintained.

  • Being an important landmark in the game, ensuring important functionality was not affected during the project development cycle.

  • Working daily with our internal and external development team.

  • Daily use of Azure DevOps to submit, track and verify bugs.

  • Creating test plans and sheets to test each monthly iteration of the Port we shipped.

  • Working with the insider’s program and the feedback gathered from it.

Adventures

Adventures in the Sea of Thieves were time limited story-based adventures that we released monthly and ran for 2 weeks at a time, I was part of the test team that led testing on both Adventure 7 (The Sirens Prize) and Adventure 9 (Return of the Damned). Due to the nature of creating time limited content, adventures brought their own challenges such as smaller development cycles and tighter deadlines, from a testing and quality perspective this meant it was important that despite this we had to continue to reach the quality bar we set for ourselves, this raised the importance more than ever of ensuring that information on issues is distributed to the relevant parties in a timely manner and correctly prioritising issues depending on their severity.

During the development of adventures my role consisted of the following:

  • Attending daily stand-up meetings.

  • Showcase the current state of the project in weekly review meetings.

  • Working daily with our internal and external development team.

  • Working with the insider’s program and the feedback gathered from it.

  • Daily use of Azure DevOps to submit, track and verify bugs.

  • Evaluating the severity of known issues taking into consideration the nature of the feature being time limited.

  • Ensuring the quality and accuracy of the community-based voting system used in Adventure 9.

  • Creating test plans and sheets to fit the shorter development time of the feature.

  • Creating verification tasks for the external test team.

Other

In addition to the projects listed above I also worked on other releases during my time on Sea of Thieves which include:

  • Addition support for the release of The Legend of Monkey Island Tales 1 and 3.

  • Grogmanay - A New Years time limited yearly event.

  • Time limited Christmas theming in the world.

  • Addition support for Adventures 6 (A Hunters Cry) and 8 (The Herald of the Flame).

  • Addition support for monthly based cosmetic releases.