Role Responsibilities:

• Designed the Blowpipe weapon and its supporting stealth mechanics, giving players a quieter way to take on enemies and other crews
• Designed and balanced the Mimic Dart, letting players take on the appearance of the target they hit, creating new opportunities for deception without making it frustrating to play against
• Designed and balanced the Black Powder dart, tuning its effects so it offered a distinct option alongside the Blowpipe’s other ammo types
• Balanced the Blowpipe and its darts to fit within the existing combat sandbox
• Designed and implemented the Hanging Points stealth system, letting players hang from specific points in the world and on player ships to hide, wait for the right moment, or approach other crews unseen
• Wrote the player callouts for the season’s new items and mechanics
• Iterated on the designs through playtests and Insider Programme feedback, from early production to release

Project Challenges:

Creating a new kind of weapon:

• The Blowpipe was designed as a stealth weapon with a unique twist: multiple ammo types in one weapon, each with its own effect
• It charges up before firing, with the charge level deciding how far the dart flies, unlike any other weapon in the game
• It also has a sense of humour true to Sea of Thieves: when you run out of darts, it becomes a playable instrument

Keeping a silent weapon fair:

• The Blowpipe is quiet by design, so unless you’re right next to the shooter you won’t hear it, which risked making it feel unfair in a game full of loud cannons and guns
• The solution was to put the feedback on the darts rather than the weapon. The Black Powder dart has a bright, audible fuse, the Poison dart has a snake-like hiss and a purple cloud, and the Lure dart has a large glint
• The two damage darts are easy to spot, while the utility darts stay quieter to support stealth play

Balancing the Mimic Dart:

• The Mimic Dart disguises the shooter, so the affected player gets a clear on-screen indicator while the effect is active
• It has several counters: destroying the dart, firing another dart to replace it (only one can exist in the world at a time), or waiting for the effect to wear off
• Some enemy types couldn’t support the effect because of animation system limits, so this was turned into a story beat: their own ancient magic protects them from the Ancients’ mimic magic

Balancing the Black Powder dart:

• It works like a miniature gunpowder keg: it sticks to a target, a visible fuse burns down, then it detonates with area damage followed by a short burn
• The fuse is visible to nearby players, and the stuck player gets a unique on-screen warning, keeping it counterable by jumping into water or throwing a bucket of water over yourself
• Damage was tuned so that two darts plus the full burn take roughly as long to defeat a player as other ranged weapons, with the Poison dart landing at similar damage
• Black Powder darts can stack: if two players hit the same target, the explosions chain together, creating fun risk-and-reward moments

Designing Hanging Points:

• Hanging points on ships had a performance cost, so their placement was limited to clear areas of the hull, such as the stern and near the cannons
• Sea of Thieves blends every pirate’s animations between body types rather than using fixed versions, and that blending couldn’t be changed. As a result, the hanging animation clipped badly for some pirates, in some cases leaving them entirely inside the ship and able to hide unfairly, so positions had to be adjusted point by point to minimise it

Commendations and progression:

• The season’s commendations leaned into Sea of Thieves’ humour and social play, such as pointing at the player you’re mimicking while disguised as them
• New XP sources rewarded using the new tools: acting while stealthed or mimicked, or using the Blowpipe
• Unlike most XP sources, these actions had no natural cooldown, so they had to be balanced carefully to stop players spamming them to rush through the Plunder Pass