How Rare Designed the Sea of ​​Thieves Infinite Pirate Generator

Character customization is a big part of the appeal of online games, and developers who work on such games can appreciate how hard it can be to control the "look" of characters without overpowering the player.

When the venerable British studio Rare began developing a group narrative for its multiplayer game, it gave its players the opportunity to play as the pirate of their dreams and create their own legend. Pirates can explore the vast world inhabited by other players by digging for treasure, collecting valuables and winning to improve their reputation on the high seas and earn more coins.

But Rare was concerned about consistency in Sea of ​​Thieves . He wanted to create a visual style that would pair perfectly with each other, and was afraid that players would create pirate avatars that would go against the game's art intent by bringing together deliberately corrupted characters.

To counter this, Rare has developed an "infinite pirate generator" character creator that allows players to endlessly generate new pirates at the touch of a button to find the one that's right for them. It required a lot of fine-tuning to get the rights and was an interdisciplinary effort bringing together the work of technical artist Dan Chael, engineer Remy Gillig and the character and outsourcing team.

"Stopping the abominations that can happen with a completely free-mixed character creator is something we put a lot of time into, but try to make them as invisible as possible from the player's perspective," says lead character artist  Sam Chester . We really wanted the whole process to feel exciting and even magical - even after 4 years on the project, I can still spend hours just generating new pirates and be delighted with the results.

behind the curtain

The way it works is that there is one base grid for all characters, which then has male and female shapes that can blend on top. Each character also has the same starting face, ensuring that no matter how long the player takes to generate new pirates, the face and body will always blend seamlessly.

“We [also] have a range of shapes on the level below that control the rotation, scale, and movement of each part of the face,” Chester continues. “Level down again, and here we have a range of shapes that change the shape of each facial feature — noses can be pointed with narrow nostrils, rounded with a curved point, or square with slanted nostrils, for example. By combining all these means, we can get a face with a unique expression, and then that face will be placed into a unique body shape.”

The character art team used a tool they called the "infinite pirate editor" to control how far these figures travel for each age, ethnicity, and gender.

It took a lot of trial and error as they tried to determine which blends needed to be changed to avoid facial features such as lips and eyes coming through nose shapes. It was a process of understanding which specific blends to test with each other and figuring out how the team could change the space and position of each face object to blend better. Without properly tweaking these lists, or turning them off completely, facial features can be broken and chaos is likely to ensue.

Adding more variety

The art team also added accessories and features to make every pirate feel a little more unique. Each pirate may have body tattoos, scars, and other distinctive features such as a wooden leg or an eyepatch.

“We played with various accessories, items, hair and beards to give each piece its own unique personality at the forefront, but ultimately chose the one you see today,” says Chester. - There is a fairly wide range of elements that make every pirate out of gender, ethnicity, and age, including the hero [up to] fraudulent probability, hair color, eye color, scars, freckles, tattoos, gooey eyes […] and more! »

It's important to note that the team kept the clothing options as simple as possible, as they wanted people to choose their pirates based on their basic characteristics. In terms of game design, they wanted players to unlock new clothes by turning in quest items, upgrading and customizing in-game, rather than just spinning an endless pirate generator to earn better cosmetics.

Speed ​​control

The Pirate Generator also relied heavily on the team getting the numbers right in order to succeed. For example, if a player wanted to choose a female avatar, Rare needed to be able to consistently give them as many options as they would if they chose a male avatar. The same applies to other ethnicities and ages as the team aims to provide an intuitive experience for everyone.

“In addition to all the work to allow the base shapes to interact seamlessly, there is a set of rules that govern which groups of pirates are generated in the foreground,” says Chester. “We aim to ensure an equal distribution of genders, ethnicities and ages, with an equal split between pirate heroes or rogues in every spin. There is still some randomness so that not all generations are the same, but over time the splits should be equally weighted.”

The Rare team didn't stop there. After the game was released, players reported that it took too long to create and that it was impossible to keep the pirate alive across generations. The folks at Rare say they've already thought about this, but haven't yet implemented a tool to "keep" generated pirates for later. Therefore, they quickly tracked the development and implementation of this feature, which meant that players could better compare and contrast their favorite pirates, resulting in a more user-friendly system.

However, the team is still working on improving the performance of the pirate infinite generator and specific rules based on the feedback they receive from their community. Chester says this feedback is especially important given that the developers have been working on the mechanics for four years in relative isolation.

“Being so close to a feature for so long gives you some blindness to it, so being able to look at it in a new way [was] a really valuable experience,” Chester concludes. "The rule set and the flow actually in front of us is what we're looking at right now, so hopefully we'll show you some new work soon."