Virtual Battlegrounds

Level Designer

SEP 2018 - DEC 202 • CYBERDREAM

Virtual Battlegrounds is a battle royale built from the ground up for virtual reality: tactical gunplay, physically controlled locomotion, and a last-warrior-standing fight across a 4 km² dystopian island. It launched into Early Access in 2020 and placed Bronze on Steam's Best of VR 2020 list.

I joined Cyberdream as a level design intern and was hired full-time after shipping my first POI. Over two years I designed the island's major locations, pitched and built the zipline traversal network that became a signature mechanic, and owned map-wide systems: loot distribution, ring pacing, and the vegetation that gave the island its look.

The Constraint

Players could climb anything, so I couldn't hide anything. The climbing system let players scale any wall and pull along any ceiling, which made every surface a combat position. A roof had to be as playable as the kitchen under it.

VR raised the stakes everywhere else. Players controlled the camera, so spaces had to hold up from any angle. Locomotion was physical: sprinting meant pumping your arms, swimming meant stroking, reloading meant handling the gun. Movement had a real cost, and the level design had to respect it.

And every match opened in the air. Players parachuted in, choosing where to land from high above, so every POI needed a silhouette and a layout you could read from the sky.

Bronze

on Steam's Best of VR 2020, shipped by a team of roughly two full-time, four part-time, and a rotating group of interns.

Major Contributions

Designed the island's three major POIs: the Asylum, Sandford, and the Warehouse District

Pitched, designed, and implemented the zipline network: 13 towers plus point-to-point lines across POIs

Owned POIs end to end, from Probuilder blockout through final modeling and texturing

Designed loot distribution and retuned ring pacing through weekly community playtests

Built 6 biomes with a two-layer foliage system tuned for VR performance

Reclaimed the map's dead space with the Fishing Village and Campsite

Level Design

The Asylum, the POI that earned the job

The terrain had just been sculpted when I joined: two islands split by water, joined by two bridges. The northeast corner of the southern island was empty, and my first task was to fill it with the region's primary POI, a hot drop worth landing on for high-tier loot. I pitched an Asylum in a Level Design Document with reference, gameplay requirements, and the case for the location.

I designed around three goals. Multiple buildings, so the POI offered genuinely different fights: interiors of long halls and rooms built for ambush, exteriors built for medium and long range across rooftops and a courtyard. Real scale, with multiple floors. And a consistent identity where every building still had its own purpose.

The result was four connected buildings around a central courtyard. A three-floor entrance ran from lobby to administrative offices to the director's office up top. Two mirrored patient wings formed the arms, long two-story halls of patient rooms opening into a central gathering space that broke sightlines and gave cover from the corridors. The back building stacked a two-story kitchen and cafeteria under third-floor surgical rooms. Weapon spawns skewed to SMGs and pistols to match the close quarters.

The Asylum became one of the map's most popular hot drops, the place players said they landed first, in our Discord and in playtests. It also changed my standing on the team: I was hired full-time after shipping it.

Intern → Hire

After shipping the POI

System Design

The zipline network, and why players kept getting tired

The ring exposed a problem unique to VR. As it shrank, players had to cover long distances to stay inside the next zone, and sprinting here meant physically pumping your arms. Players weren't just crossing a map, they were exercising, and they were getting tired in real life. We needed a way across the island that didn't cost stamina the game couldn't give back.

I worked out a zipline mechanic with an engineer: get within proximity of a line, attach, and it carries you forward, free hand still able to shoot, heal, or throw. Engineering gave me a tool to generate the zipline meshes, and I plotted a network spanning the map between the major POIs.

Then I gave the ziplines a reason to exist. I had an artist build a transmission tower, designed a defensible platform into its upper section, and spread 13 of them across the island, turning their power lines into the ziplines themselves. The infrastructure disappeared into the environment, and the towers doubled as defensible high ground where the map needed verticality.

Then I retrofitted the older areas with point-to-point lines. The best was a fire tower prefab you could climb by stair or ride to the top by zipline; I scattered them through the woods for vantage and to break up foliage-heavy sightlines. The same pass gave Mt. Ostenburk, the southern island's landmark mountain, a reason to visit: shanty sniper towers, a structure built into the mountainside, and a long zipline from base to summit. That summit view ended up in a lot of our early marketing.

After launch, ziplines were a signature mechanic, and every POI I built afterward was designed around them.

13

Towers, map-wide

1 hand free

To shoot, heal, throw

Level Design

Sandford, my first POI owned to final art

The northern island had a town left from preproduction, and it showed: dated construction, no identity, a layout nobody enjoyed fighting through. I volunteered to replace it because I had a vision for it, and I wrote an LDD documenting the problems and the plan: a place that read as a real town, with districts, buildings that had purpose, and streets worth fighting over.

This was the first POI I carried alone from start to finish. I blocked out the whole town in Probuilder, and once it was approved I took it through final art myself: modeling and texturing every building, dressing the interiors, placing props and weapon spawns, and wiring in ziplines.

The finished town had eleven buildings around a public park, from an apartment complex and town hall to a police station and diner, plus four storefronts designed to be reused at different orientations so the town could grow without repeating itself.

Sandford also picked up a second life I hadn't planned. It became the game's staging area: while lobbies filled, players spawned into the town under team deathmatch rules, warming up with the weapons and mechanics before the real match began. Every player in every match passed through it.

11

Buildings + a park

Every match

Started here

Level Design

The Warehouse District, one POI for every mechanic

The southeast of the southern island was a dead zone, barren ground that gave players no reason to land south instead of north. For the game's second content season I pitched a POI to fix that, and it became the largest location we ever added to the map. Sandford had proven I could carry a POI to final art alone; this was that at twice the scale, from pitch through blockout, final art, population, and the terrain edits underneath. It kept demanding new skills, down to picking up Substance Painter to author its materials.

I built five warehouses, each a unique shape and layout, each with large roof windows players could drop through, whether to surprise a fight below or to skydive straight from the plane into the loot. Between them sat a cargo-container arena for close quarters, two boat ramps where container ships docked, and two towering cranes.

This was where the zipline system grew a new trick: vertical lines. Players could zip to the tops of buildings and up the cranes, turning them into commanding vantage points, so getting into position became as fast as getting between positions.

The Warehouse District launched as the centerpiece of Season 2 and led the season's marketing. It was the best showcase of the game we ever built in one place: parachute through a skylight, climb a container stack, zipline between rooftops, fight across open ground with strategic cover. Players told us it was their favorite part of the map. It was mine too.

5

Warehouses, no two alike

Largest

POI on the map

Systems & Process

Tuning the island in public

In the months before Early Access we playtested weekly with our community. I helped run the sessions, gathered the feedback, and brought it back to the team, and some of the game's biggest revisions came straight out of that loop.

The clearest was pacing. Players told us the opening ring was too large and closed too slowly, and matches sagged because nobody could find anyone. I cut looting time per zone closure and resized the ring at each tier, and encounters came noticeably faster. The complaint disappeared from the next rounds of testing.

Loot ran on a related idea: direct players without instructing them. Using an engineering-built spawn tool, I mapped the island's loot zones and weighted high-tier gear toward the major POIs, so the risk and reward of a drop was legible from the plane. Each designer then placed spawns in their own POI as the final pass after set dressing, following the standard I set in my own LDDs: every POI states what it adds, where it goes, why the map needs it, and what makes it distinct.

Weekly

Community playtests

World Design

Turning the island's dead space into places to fight

Some of the map wasn't finished so much as abandoned, and I kept volunteering to fix it. The clearest case was the water at the center. The two islands were split by a band of steep cliffs and sea, negative space a match could never use because we deliberately kept the ring from closing over open water.

I turned it into the Fishing Village. I resloped the terrain on both shores into beachfront, converted existing house prefabs into elevated fishing huts, and connected them with docks spanning the water. Eight stilted houses gave the map a water-adjacent endgame location it never had, and reclaimed its largest stretch of dead space. On the far eastern shore I added a smaller Campsite drop, tents and an enterable RV, to give that corner a reason to exist too.

The island's look went through the same playtest loop. Feedback said it felt bare, so I rebuilt the vegetation with Vegetation Studio Pro: six biomes, from tropical beach to mountaintop to underwater, each with its own foliage and per-species rules for density, spawn angle, and rotation. VR performance is unforgiving, so I built the foliage in two layers, a sparse base and a denser advanced pass, and let players toggle between them in settings to match their hardware.

6

Biomes

8

Fishing Village houses