acrofan

Industry Economy TECH GAME
Society Comfort AUTO MEDIA

Pearl Abyss Developers Give First Global Lectures at Game Developers Conference 2018

  • Friday, March 16, 2018, 4:04 pm
  • ACROFAN=Jae-Yong Ryu
  • jaeyong.ryu@acrofan.com
For the first time since the launch of their successful MMORPG Black Desert Online in 2015, Pearl Abyss is bringing their development team to the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco to share their experiences about working on the game.

Black Desert Online is known for its stunning graphics, seamless open world, intuitive combat system and a soundtrack to complete the immersive world. This is the first time Pearl Abyss has come forward globally to discuss their proprietary game engine that the company uses to develop all their games and introduce the music genius behind the soundtrack.

On March 23, Pearl Abyss will hold two sessions in room 2009 in the West Hall at GDC. The first lecturer will be Black Desert’s audio director, Hwiman Ryu. Mr. Ryu has been with the Pearl Abyss team since the start of the Black Desert project where he is in charge of the music and game audio. He is regarded as one of the most popular audio directors in the Korean game industry. Better known to his fans as “Croove”, his previous work on rhythm game classics DJMax and EZ2DJ was what put him on the map in the industry. He is now working on remastering the original Black Desert MIDI soundtrack with orchestrated music conducted and performed by famed European orchestras.

In his lecture, he will discuss some of the successes and failures he faced during the span of the project with focus on composition, arrangement and application of the Black Desert soundtrack.

He will explain how the music was applied to an open-world game and the steps, including score selection, planning and production, that led up to the finished product. Finally, he will talk about his experiences recording with an orchestra for the Black Desert audio remastering project as well as ways to use costly orchestral recordings efficiently without wasting resources.

Lecture schedule and location
Friday, March 23 | 10:00am - 11:00am
Room 2009, West Hall

The second lecture will be given by two members of the game engine team. Dongwook Ha is one of the lead programmers currently at Pearl Abyss. Mr. Ha has been working with the Pearl Abyss team for 7 years and is interested in developing a multi-platform game engine. His work on the Black Desert project has contributed greatly to the success of the game. Gwanghyeon Go is a software engineer that is part of the engine team at Pearl Abyss working on real-time rendering and engine architecture. Before joining the company, he worked at NHN Games and Webzen.

The two lecturers will share the secrets of their success and their expertise in the game engine development process. This includes the various techniques that have been implemented to overcome the challenges that they faced along the way. They will discuss the efforts that have been made to mass produce the various resources such as terrain, characters, etc., with limited manpower. They will also cover what it is like to deal with optimizing a massive living world that has an infinite number of characters, how that memory is organized, the rendering techniques used in the process and ultimately why they chose these methods for Black Desert Online.

Lecture schedule and location:
Friday, March 23 | 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Room 2009, West Hall