PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds art boss on designing 64-square kilometers

Here’s my full Q&A with PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds art director David Curd:

GamesBeat: So you’re basically overseeing the creation of new maps, correct?

Dave Curd: Yeah. To give you some context, as art director of the environment work, if it’s a map that’s what I work on.

I wear two big hats. The first thing is overseeing vis-dev of all the map creation. That’s everything from the color palette, the trees, the rocks, the architecture, what the uniques are. Just meat and potato art director stuff. But then there’s also a lot of mentoring, managing, coaching, working directly with all of our environment artists, creating paintings, a lot of reference gathering, and as you’d expect a lot of meetings. I’m trying to oversee the general direction, but then I’m getting my hands dirty with the artists, and I’m getting in an editor and doing some set dress, doing some lighting, designing some towns. They give me a lot of stuff to do, which is actually right up my alley.

GamesBeat: It sounds like your job is to set an overall tone, not just with the production and what you’re creating, but with the people who are creating it?

Curd: Oh, yeah. That’s totally fair. It’s kind of making sure we’re all on the same page. Every artist has context that we all understand. That’s a goal. That means a visual goal — from an atmosphere perspective, what should the map feel like? — down to a work philosophy goal. How do we like to get stuff done? How do we like to give feedback? Trying to build that culture.

GamesBeat: What stands out to you in this job, doing this job on this game, that might be different from doing it on another game or another type of product?

Curd: The liberty and freedom of this job has been very different from my–I came up in traditional western triple-A FPS at Raven Software. Really, PUBG has trusted the PUBG Madison studio to innovate and vanguard and try new stuff. For as many meetings as we have, it’s nothing compared to what I’ve seen in my past. That’s both invigorating and also terrifying, obviously, because you want to make sure everyone loves your stuff. The freedom has been the most awesome opportunity about this gig.

GamesBeat: Do you think that freedom is necessary to work on a living game like this, a game that’s already been around for more than a year and is going to be around for quite a few more? Is that freedom necessary to ensure that the game stays experimental and interesting?

Curd: I feel like you hit the nail on the head. First of all, if we were all tied up and bound by meetings, you’d never get an 8 by 8 kilometer map done. There’s too much to do, too much to suss out, too many decisions to be made, too many towns to be designed. You have to have the freedom to get loose, to fail, to innovate, to try new stuff. That’s something that PUBG has been very generous with. You also hit the nail on the head in terms of, it’s a living game. Erangel and Miramar are both very different today than they were last year, and it’s easy to imagine they’ll be different as time goes on. That’s exactly right.

GamesBeat: You talked about the freedom to fail. What are some examples of how that plays out?

Curd: We immediately recognized, when Erangel came out in March, that we’ve got a hit. This is a cool game. We have the first mover advantage. A lot of studios will try something similar very soon. Very quickly — I started a couple of months later, in July — he said, hey, we don’t have the perfect BR map yet. With Miramar, let’s try a very different approach to cover. The offroad driving should feel very different. Let’s introduce verticality with all these buildings. A more conservative company would have said, let’s make Erangel again but put it in a different location.

We tried very different design philosophies, because we’re still trying to find what the perfect distance to encounters is, and what the perfect head to heads feel like. With Miramar, it was a divisive map. Some people are really into it and some people will vote to skip, which is what we want. With millions of users, I don’t think it’s possible to keep everyone happy, but you can create lots of different experiences and find out what really globally resonates. That’s our goal, trying to find–how do we please all of our different users? We have first-person users. We have the third-person players. We’re always allowed to tinker and find what people like best.

GamesBeat: When you do feel like you have to go in and change something, are you making tiny little changes to the way stuff looks, to what kind of buildings are in a town? What are you changing?

Curd: I think everything’s on the table. We’ve adjusted materials over the year. We’ve certainly adjusted interior layouts. The big thing in Miramar, between how it initially launched and where it is now, is we’ve simplified the layouts where we could. We offered a bit more verticality. In some of our taller buildings, there’s not just staircases. There are holes in the floors. Then we’ll pile up little filing cabinets and stuff for players to climb through, so there’s more than one way to clear a room.

And in terms of art, we’re always looking at increasing our visual fidelity. Whether that’s revisiting props or–we saw Korea add some really fun weather settings to Miramar, which I thought was really cool. Again, that’s the joy of that forever-on persistent game. We have so much freedom to keep tweaking and pushing and trying to make it better.

GamesBeat: Maybe in a more general sense, when you set out to make a new 8-by-8 map, what are the challenges you encounter and what are you overcoming?

Curd: I could speak to Sanhok, which I thought was a big departure from Erangel and Miramar because it was so small. At the beginning of each map, there’s a high level discussion with all the stakeholder of, what is the emotional gameplay feeling we want to express to our users? What’s the best way to get there? And more important, how is this different than what’s come before? We’re not interested in just churning out the same map with a different color palette.

With Sanhok we thought, let’s make something more competitive. Let’s make something with really clearly designed intentional head to head combat spaces. As much as you can for not knowing where the players are going to drop. And how do we make sure player reads are protected? This is all stuff we think about at a high level. With Sanhok, everything about the layouts was super smooth. We knew we were going to increase the loot density. Therefore, we also simplified the layout. All that inferior set dress, we decided to make sure to get that up against the walls, to make sure players could do these nice general soft S curves through the layout.

When you explore a building, we want you just running, looting, and gliding to the next window, not getting caught up on set dress. We also wanted to push the unique areas a little farther, like our paradise resort or the ruins. Now that the Madison team–they really cut their teeth on Miramar. Now that we were all comfortable with what BR was, we wanted to start making some very special, unique areas for players to visit.

GamesBeat: Could you describe that process a bit more? Once you got up on your feet and got some confidence there, what did you use that confidence to do that you wouldn’t have done at the beginning?

Curd: At the beginning, we were given the best practices and guidelines and constraints from the Korean design team. They’ve really done a lot of metrics and a lot of data to see how people play these things. But once we saw how that worked in action in Miramar, we kind of learned–okay, these are some general best distances from town to town or house set to house set or loot shack to loot shack based on time to loot, being mindful of performance, making sure we don’t have too many cool interesting things right next to each other so that everyone has nice FPS. Then also saying, okay, let’s have some very different-feeling uniques, meaning the paradise resort plays so much differently than the ruins, because we came at it from some high level–what if paradise almost feels like a traditional FPS map?

What if ruins is this really claustrophobic shotgun banger? The boot camp language that we developed, the kind of meta-lore of the map–hey, it’s this smaller 4 by 4 map. In our internal thinking, what if this is the training grounds for the battle royale contestants that eventually graduate to the 8 by 8s? We thought, let’s have these Playerunknown boot camps for players to engage in. And we were able to be really simple with the architecture. We were purposefully very minimal with those concrete materials, so that player reads were really protected. It was really easy to see who you were shooting at. Through those boot camp towns and the central training center in the middle of the map, that’s where we wanted to get players used to vaulting, used to mantling, used to looting and shooting. We were really pleased with that–the goal with Sanhok was to get more competitive users in, but we also wanted to use architecture and color to help players learn to play our game better.

GamesBeat: What’s been the biggest challenge, then? What’s the thing that’s made you scratch your head the hardest or give you the biggest headache, but that you were able to overcome?

Curd: You know, I think it’s really getting a handle on designing a game that can be approached from any direction. With a traditional FPS map, we control the spawns. We control which way you face when you spawn. We know there will be respawns. If you get killed in a cheesy way, no worries. You’ll pop back up and spawn where we tell you to spawn. With this map, with Sanhok and all the maps we’re making after that, we’re really trying to think about–the players can approach these towns, approach these unique areas, from any direction. It’s how we sprinkle cover. It’s how we get in there and actually move the rocks and trees and trash cans to create subtle paths to bring the players into our towns.

If you’re a player, it’s super scary to go anywhere besides the woods. When you’re in the wilderness — hiding behind rocks, hiding behind trees — you’re most safe. You’re least likely to be shot. You’re least likely to take a fight. We have to entice players into these battlezones. We obviously do that with loot. If you want the best loot you have to go to the most dangerous sports. But we also have to leave a lot of cover breadcrumbs. What we do with obscuring sight lines and how we use light to entice players to go to places they wouldn’t ordinarily go–that’s been the big challenge that I think we’re doing well at.

Really, if you want to win the game, you should probably just land in the woods and loot bodies, right? But we make these areas interesting. We make them hopefully fair. That drives people to hot drop. That lets people mix it up in these areas. If you’re not careful with cover, if you’re not careful with loot, if you’re not careful with layout, players aren’t going to go there. And that’s why you’ll see us revisit maps all the time, because we’re always enticing players to take these interesting adventures. We want them to explore the island. We want them to have a very different game every time.

GamesBeat: Is there anything else that you’d really like to touch on?

Curd: Just some stuff that springs up to me is–we set out to make a global team, and it really worked. The idea that we’re able to have a Madison art team and a Seoul art team not competing, but being on the same page and supporting and teaching each other. The fact that you have a lot of western triple-A talent working with these amazing Korean artists that came up through the Korean PC and mobile scene, and that we’re able to teach each other new stuff, has been really awesome. It’s been a fresh perspective. We’ve learned a lot. Hopefully they’ve learned a lot. I’m just enjoying the hell out of the collaboration. I’m so lucky to be a part of that.