Hoist the Canvas: Sea of Thieves Case Study
/At Auroch Digital, we don’t just make great games, we’re also available as a Work-For-Hire studio, offering our team of experts and our decades of experience to deliver high-quality results.
Last month we lowered our pirate flags and returned to dry land after two years sailing the seas with Rare, creating hearty cosmetics for Sea of Thieves.
It’s always sad when it’s time to wrap up a project, especially one as fun to work on as Sea of Thieves, but we thought we’d take this opportunity to share some of the content created by our team and hear about the experience from them.
Auroch Digital and Sea of Thieves
Partnering with Rare | Raise the Jolly Roger
Two years ago, Rare approached our team at Auroch Digital to support the upcoming Seasons of their action-adventure pirate game, Sea of Thieves.
Sea of Thieves offers the essential pirate experience, from sailing and fighting to exploring and looting – everything you need to live the pirate life and become a legend in your own right. With no set roles, you have complete freedom to approach the world, and other players, however you choose.
Working on an IP as well-known as Sea of Thieves was no easy undertaking. Since 2018, Rare’s team have done an incredible job steering the direction and success of the game and it recently reached an amazing milestone of 40 million players welcomed to the game across Xbox, Windows 10/11 and Steam – before adding boatloads of new players when it launched on PlayStation®5 earlier this year.
“You’re asked to add to a world that’s loved by both its players and creators, which means a lot of trust is placed in us. We wanted to make sure we did right by everyone who is part of this game, so we took that responsibility very seriously from the very start.”
For our team understanding the IP and working towards the client’s goals for the IP was of the utmost importance.
Compared to our other Work-For-Hire projects, our support for Sea of Thieves was predominantly art-focused and required a streamlined cosmetic pipeline, where we could own every aspect of the process from start to finish.
“Due to the nature of evolving games, we weren’t as involved with other departments as a standard Auroch Digital project, however that let us really focus in on the core Art skills throughout the project, which really showed the importance of being able to follow a concept, not only in shapes and value, but also in what the concept is trying to convey.”
The team working on Sea of thieves at Auroch Digital
Meet Our Team | The Crew
With experience working on titles such as Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, V Rising, and Mars Horizon, the Auroch Digital team was well up to the task.
In this case study, Chris Raadjes, Artistic Director (He/Him), Erin Martel, Lead Game Designer (She/Her), and Eren Peddie, Lead Artist (She/They) will be providing insight into their experience working on this project.
But this wasn’t an Auroch Digital-only project. Through our role as a studio within Sumo Digital, we were able to collaborate with other Sumo studios and invite their expertise to join us on this project.
Talented team members from Atomhawk Newcastle, Sumo Newcastle, Sumo Nottingham and Sumo Pune joined us on our voyage to create a dedicated team of artists and designers, focused solely on Sea of Thieves and creating the astounding cosmetics that were released each Season.
The Project | A Pirate Voyage
Every Season started with a brief. Then concept artists at Rare and Auroch Digital would explore this assigned theme together in a “concept jam” – a short, day-long session during which they’d sketch and paint up a variety of ideas to create the vision for the Season going forward.
Then came content production. This phase was a tricky balance of introducing new elements to make every piece special and unique, while also maintaining the overarching vision and ensuring the set stayed consistent and unified.
“One of the hardest parts of being an 3D artist was getting from a 2D concept to 3D and ensuring it still felt the same, so this project was a great challenge for our 3D team on doing that, whilst also developing our Concept team’s skills at communicating intention and thinking about the knock-on effects their decisions may have on the rest of the team.”
As an evolving game, new cosmetics were released regularly, which meant the cosmetics produced for Sea of Thieves needed to be completed within incredibly tight deadlines.
“Communication was key on this project because we needed to create and publish assets on a tight deadline.”
Additionally, Auroch Digital is not as large as Rare, and we were aware that we didn’t want to take too much time away from their team. So, we adopted some of their working practices into our art production pipeline: we set up our own internal reviews where we’d assess whether work was ready to show in Rare’s review meetings.
Once the finished cosmetics were delivered then the Design team would author the content into the game, and the QA team would handle all the relevant testing requirements to ensure everything was up to Rare’s standard before release.
Our producers supported this process from creation to release every month. They worked directly with each discipline to facilitate communication via tracking asset statuses, creating tasks, and then duplicating this work to Rare's systems.
The Results | A Chest of Gold
Over the two years dedicated to this project, our team at Auroch Digital worked on over 100 different pieces of content for Sea of Thieves, including ship sets, clothing, emotes, pets, and more.
Our team is immensely proud of the work they’ve done for Sea of Thieves and Rare and here’s a look at some of the assets they created.
Above all else, the real highlight of this experience was seeing the response from the players.
“I was very happy to see the fan reaction to our artists’ first set of art assets for the game. The response to the Gold Leaf Set was very complimentary.”
“Hearing someone say ‘this might be one of my favourite items in the game’ is incredibly gratifying, because you know how many people worked on it to get that reaction.”
The response from the community was incredible! A lot of Auroch Digital were huge fans and active players of Sea of Thieves before working on this project. For them some of the best moments were seeing their final 3D assets come to life in Sea of Thieves’ beautifully lit environments and playing the game with sets that they had created.
Future Projects | What’s on the Horizon?
Every co-development project is a valuable opportunity for our team to improve our own processes and techniques by learning from the expertise of our partners.
“As a designer, it is a different type of challenge to work with well-established IP, but it is also a chance to learn different techniques, software and workflows.”
But they're also an opportunity to share our team’s expertise! We are experts in porting of all kinds, from mobile to PC, from PC to console, even from boardgame to video game. We work with large and established IPs, on asset and content creation, and much more. We also offer publishing services alongside our porting work with our in-house marketing department.
Now that this project is wrapped up, who knows where the tide will take us next. We’re looking for another adventure for our crew, whether that’s a new Work-For-Hire project or another co-development opportunity. Our team is excited to get started!
Are you interested in a Work-For-Hire project with Auroch Digital? Reach out to darkle@aurochdigital.com and we’ll be happy to see how Auroch Digital can help you.