For the first time since the 2015 release of the hit MMORPG Black Desert Online, Pearl Abyss will bring its development team to the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco to share their experiences on game development.

Black Desert Online is well known for having amazing graphics, a huge open world, and a soundtrack that completes this absorbing world. This is the first time that Pearl Abyss has addressed the public to talk about the game's proprietary engine they use to develop their games, and also features the musical genius behind the soundtrack, at the Game Developers Conference 2018

On March 23rd, Pearl Abyss will have two sessions in the 2009 room of the West Hall at the Game Developers Conference 2018.The first talk will be from Black Desert's Audio Director, Hwiman Ryu. Ryu has been on the Pearl Abyss team since the beginning of the Black Desert project; has been in charge of the music and audio of the game. Ryu is one of the most popular audio directors in the Korean video game industry. His fans know him as “Croove,” and his previous works include the classic games DJMax and EZ2DJ, which put him on the industry map. Right now he is working on the remastering of the Black Desert MIDI soundtrack together with renowned orchestras from all over Europe.

In his presentation, he will reveal some of the successes and failures that he faced during the project, with an emphasis on the composition, layout and application of the Black Desert soundtrack. Ryu will explain how the music was applied to the open world video game and the steps that were taken to arrive at the final result: its selection, planning and production. Lastly, he will talk about his experiences recording the Black Desert Audio Remastering and how to use expensive orchestral recordings efficiently without wasting resources.

 Location and schedule of the talk:

March 23, Friday | 10:00 am - 11:00 am

Room 2009, West Hall

The second talk will be given by two members of the team who work with the game engine. Dongwook Ha is one of the main programmers currently working at Pearl Abyss. Dongwook Ha has worked with the Pearl Abyss team for 7 years and develops a multi-platform graphics engine. His work on the Black Desert project has been an important contribution to the success of the game. Gwanghyeon Go is a software engineer who is also part of the engine team at Pearl Abyss, where he works on real-time rendering and graphics engine architecture. Before joining the company, he worked at NHN Games and Webzen.

The two presentations will share secrets of their success and their experience with the game's graphics engine in its development phase. Here we will talk about various techniques that have been implemented to solve some problems that were faced during development. They will also discuss the efforts that have been made to create various resources such as terrain, characters, etc… with a small team. They will also explain how to optimize a massive massive world full of life that has an infinite number of characters, how memory is organized, the rendering techniques used in the process, and why they used these methods for Black Desert Online.

Location and schedule of the talk:

March 23, Friday | 1:30 pm - 2:30 pm

Room 2009, West Hall