Prologue’s glider: a prototype that refused to die

Overview

PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions organized an internal two-day game jam around Prologue: Go Wayback!, giving developers complete freedom to experiment with ideas, including the ones that would normally sit outside the project’s scope.

At the time, Prologue was focused on exploration, navigation, and traversing vast landscapes. Given the size of the world, the beauty of the environment, and the fact that players could only fully appreciate it from the top of the weather tower (end goal of a run), I decided to spend the game jam building a glider.

The goal was simply to create something fun. A few hours later, I had a prototype. And eventually, it was shipping to players.

The plan

Prologue’s world is large and visually striking. Players spend a significant amount of time navigating forests, hills, river, and valleys. Despite this, there were very few opportunities to appreciate the landscape from above. The only location that really provided a panoramic view of the world was the weather tower, which is your final destination and goal within a run.

With roughly five hours available for implementation, I wanted to create something that could:

• Leverage the scale of the world.
• Offer a new perspective on exploration.
• Be implemented quickly.
• Feel different from everything else in the game.

This is why I decided to work on a hang glider.
Exploration is a core part of Prologue, and no vehicles exist in the game, so the idea felt like it could offer a completely new way to experience the world.

Design and implementation

One of the first challenges was that Prologue’s world was never designed for vehicles. The character controller, camera, traversal systems, and level design all assumed players would be walking.

The glider therefore became an exercise in faking a vehicle inside a game that had no vehicle framework. The original design was thought to support survival gameplay. The idea was that players would climb a hill, launch themselves into the air, and use wind currents to travel efficiently through the world. The glider was intended to be another survival tool, trading effort and preparation for faster movement.

As the prototype evolved, however, I found myself focusing less on realism and more on fun. The more realistic version was interesting. The less realistic version was enjoyable. The glider became easier to control, more forgiving, and significantly more accessible than the original concept.

One example was flight duration. A realistic implementation would eventually force the player to land. Instead, I allowed the glider to stay airborne indefinitely as long as the player kept flying correctly. This transformed the mechanic from a transportation tool into something players could simply enjoy using.

The first implementation was extremely simple:
Spawn the glider, take off, fly, land (if the game din’t crash, because this game wasn’t build for vehicles!)

Refusing to die

At the end of the game jam, we presented our work to the rest of the team. The glider immediately got a strong reaction. Colleagues found it cool and different from the rest of the experience. It gave people a new way to look at the world of Prologue.

Later, we shared it with a small number of players as an early preview and posted screenshots of it. The reaction was similar. Players wanted to try it, asked when they could use it, and saw it as a refreshing addition to the game.

This is where the prototype started refusing to die. From my perspective, the implementation was still very much a hack. It used smoke and mirrors to fake something the game was not originally built to support. I wanted to take more time, refactor it properly, and make the feature cleaner.

But the feature worked. It was fun, players wanted it, and the amount of maintenance required to ship it was relatively low. Most of the remaining work was polish: fixing crashes, handling edge cases, improving the controls, and adding input prompts to make the mechanic easier to understand.

In the end, I got overruled in the best possible way. The team and players liked the glider enough that the prototype was allowed to live. It did not need a complete rebuild to prove its value. It just needed enough polish to become safe, understandable, and enjoyable.

End result

The version that eventually shipped remained surprisingly close to the original game jam prototype. Rather than redesigning the mechanic from scratch, we focused on improving the player experience.

Additional input prompts were added to make the controls more intuitive. Players were given the ability to spawn the glider wherever they wanted. The handling was adjusted to feel smoother and more responsive. The flight speed was increased.

My original goal for the game jam was simply to answer a question: Would flying be fun in Prologue? And, admittedly, to bring a bit of my love for flying into the game. It took about five hours to get an answer.

The glider ultimately became part of Prologue’s Free Roam mode, allowing players to enjoy the world from a completely different perspective without worrying about survival mechanics.

Looking back, what I find most interesting is how little the glider changed. This is one of the realities of game development. Most prototypes exist to answer a question and eventually disappear. Every now and then, however, a prototype is so compelling that it becomes a shipped feature.

The glider was one of them.