Role Responsibilities:

• Owned Hourglass anti-cheat updates, designing changes that protected fair play without disrupting legitimate players
• Designed a shrinking battle zone to improve combat pacing and prevent stalemates
• Designed a PvP tracking system that identifies which players are in PvP and how they became engaged, giving the game an accurate picture of combat states
• Expanded field-of-view settings so players can customise FOV for individual gameplay features, such as the ship’s wheel, cannons, ladders and waterslides
• Improved keybinding options, giving players more control over their controls setup
• Carried out world cleanup and performance fixes to improve stability across platforms
• Diagnosed and fixed bugs across a range of core systems
• Used Insider Programme feedback and live-service data to identify problems and prioritise fixes
• Prototyped and developed additional features, some of which were shelved before release as priorities changed

Project Challenges:

Adding friction for repeat cheaters in Hourglass:

• Brand-new accounts could jump straight into Hourglass, so banned cheaters would simply make a new account and return immediately
• New entry requirements were added: completing the Maiden Voyage, the three main trading company tutorial voyages, and reaching a set reputation level with one faction
• This added an hour or two of genuine play before Hourglass unlocks, which is enough to deter most cheaters without blocking real players
• Clear feedback was key: disabled interactions are explained with tutorial and popup messages, so players know exactly what they need to do
• Unlocking Hourglass became a progression milestone in its own right, much like reaching Pirate Legend

Keeping Hourglass battles short and fresh:

• Some Hourglass matches were lasting hours, when they were meant to be quick naval battles
• A shrinking battle zone was introduced to bring fights to a close, with its timing and shrink amount tuned using telemetry and player insights
• The zone was originally only visible on the map table, which didn’t work once it started shrinking quickly, since players had no time to check the map. Making it readable in the moment became a key part of the work

Tracking PvP to reduce harassment:

• A new PvP tracking system records who started an encounter, who fired and who hit, so the game knows which ships are genuinely in PvP
• Ships that are repeatedly targeted respawn further away each time, and crews sunk repeatedly by the same ship are migrated to a different server to protect their experience
• Accidental PvP, such as hitting an allied ship, had to be handled fairly, and players leave PvP once they sail away beyond a set distance or time
• The system now underpins several newer features

Giving players control over field of view:

• Interactions like the ship’s wheel used to override the player’s chosen FOV, causing a sudden zoom that made some players feel nauseous
• Players can now set their own FOV for each major gameplay element, including the wheel, cannons, ladders and waterslides
• The trade-offs were weighed carefully: higher FOV costs performance on some machines, lower FOV can give a zoomed-in advantage at range, and some values could hide important details, like the ladder beside the wheel on a sloop. In the end, player choice won out

Making keybindings more flexible:

• Only one action could use a key once the player rebound it, so players who changed a binding couldn’t simply set it back without resetting to defaults
• Keybindings were grouped, so actions that can safely share a key (like interact and reload) are allowed to, while conflicting ones (like moving forwards and backwards) aren’t

Cleaning up the world for performance:

• Every level was combed through to remove leftover assets from cut and retired content, freeing up a significant amount of performance
• Some areas were reworked in the process