If you’ve ever played Sea of Thieves, the game I’m working on as an engineer at Rare Ltd, you may have run afoul of skeletons firing cannons at you while you sail past an island, minding your own business. One of the first pieces of work I did here at Rare was programming the algorithm the skellies use to aim the cannon and provide a sense of emergent danger for players. In this article I’ll give you a peek behind the curtain at how we’d build up the moving parts of a gameplay feature. We’ll go step by step through how I designed the first version of this cannon aiming algorithm, which was released around E3 2017 to our Technical Alpha players. The code may have changed quite a bit in the year since we released it, so it may not exactly match the behaviour you can see in game now.
