Hello and welcome to our second devlog!

I'm Raffa from Bippinbits, and in this devlog Ill dive into a specific challenge we encountered with upgrades and the changes we made to improve the experience for players.

Meet the Modules: The Heart of Your Cockpit

Your cockpit is comprised of different functional parts, collectively called the modules. Modules are for example:

• the Radar, to detect incoming ships
• Ammunition & Loading module with which you choose and prepare the ammunition you want to fire
• the defense module, which is your last resort for defending your bunker

The modules each come with a variety of upgrades that you can earn over time. Additionally, over the campaign you receive totally new modules and weapon systems, or replace existing ones.

Upgrades: Adapt and Improve

As part of the debriefing after each mission, you can choose one upgrade that affects one module. For example, you might increase the maximum speed that the projectiles can be travel when fired from your cannon.
After choosing an upgrade and enjoying your tea, you then go for a healthy nap. Upon waking up, you'll find the new upgrade has been installed in your cockpit, automatically!

The Upgrade Dilemma: Where Is It?

After receiving your shiny new upgrade, the challenge is to find it in the cockpit first. The game at this point did not tell you what had changed, so it became easy to miss. It's also a little strange that someone seemingly came to the bunker while you slept and installed the upgrade....
Can you find the difference? We set out to improve this, and we thought of a few approaches. Would you just be told what changed? Would the new part be highlighted, so you could spot it easily? This didn't feel quite right to us. Part of PVKKs fantasy is the joy of experimenting with your cockpit - pressing buttons, seeing what happens - without being spoon-fed information. Its a core pillar of the game. We took this to heart and made it into a pretty powerful new mechanic: you shall manually install the upgrades yourself!

Handyman: Tools of the Trade

For this task, you'll be armed with a trusty screwdriver.
Meet your new best friend! The process to install an upgraded module is straightforward: loosen all screws, remove the module, place it aside, and add a new module into the empty slot. Done! This way, you are an active part of receiving an upgrade and will always be clean on what's changed. Also, now you can sleep restfully, without fear that somebody will mess with the cockpit whilst you slumber. As a bonus, you can also swap out locations of some modules, to better fit your "workflow" and what you like. For this, we also considered standardizing module slot sizes into a very few standard sizes. This would allow enable a heavily customizable cockpit, as modules can be placed into many different locations.

Ultimately, we decided against uniform slot sizes. Being able to customize a lot is great, but it would be to the detriment of each module that now has to fit specific size requirements. It would also make the cockpit a bit more boring, as the varied shapes and unique parts create a much more interesting rhythm and visual style. Our favorite references to real cockpits always have this rhythm of small repeating patterns and self-made chaos, where everything feels custom.

The Result: A More Immersive Cockpit

The new system is intuitive, fun, and makes interacting with the cockpit feel more immersive. It opens up a lot of new possibilities, and we're really excited to make use of this.
Would you like your radar to be ceiling mounted? One of the trickiest parts of development was ensuring that module removal and placement felt intuitive without needing a tutorial. We iterated on the screwdriver interaction multiple times to get it just right.
Don't forget to tighten all screws after placing a module into a slot. Though this benefits the game hugely, it of course increases effort for us as developers. Almost every module needs to be updated to fit this new system, and the slots must be carefully cut into the consoles 3D mesh. A task thats a lot trickier than it sounds. We also took this opportunity to tackle some housekeeping, such as optimizing cockpit meshes and refining details along the way. One example are the welding lines - we replaced the mesh based welding lines with new meshes that use a normal map for details.
This saves us hundreds of thousands of polygons, improving performance.

Summary

The new system is quite immersive, and it's a great way for you to get a deeper understanding of your cockpit. You can customize it (to some extent) and switch out modules, depending on your preferences and what you think you need for a mission. There is still some follow up work for us, like devising a system that delivers the physical modules to your bunker, and a way to store or throw away all the parts you don't need. And who knows what else you can do in the Bunker with a screwdriver.... That's it for this devlog. What do you think about a bit of screwdriver action? If you want to chat with others about PVKK, ask us questions directily or bring in your feedback and ideas, please join our Discord. Thank you for reading, have a great time! ~ Raffa

[ 2025-03-14 12:14:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello and welcome to our first devlog!

PVKK will be in development for quite some time, so we thought it would be nice to share some insight into the development itself with these little devlogs. Devlogs will be authored by a variety of people on the team, and they'll be centered around something they are currently working on. Right now we plan on a monthly schedule with the devlogs - this may change sometime as we get closer to launching in the future! I'm Ren and in this first devlog, Ill give you a small overview of the bunker and dive into detail on the cockpit, which is the place where you fulfill your missions. I won't yet talk about each system in detail, but after this, you should have a sense of where you'll spend most of your time in PVKK.

Your Bunker

In PVKK, you are confined to a bunker. It's not very spacious, but over time you can make it your own place. The bunker is both your home and your workplace (home office, eh?). The facility is quite a bit larger, of course. It features the big cannon - but also some other areas. Your job, however, is to expertly fire a cannon, so there is no need to leave your room. Well, as far as you are told.

Sleepy time

First off, we have your bed, together with some of your personal items. It is unexpectedly cozy, but other than that it brings no surprises - everybody has to sleep, right? Before each mission you'll awaken here, and after each mission you'll end your day here, too.
Wait, this is actually much nicer than my real bed!

Your first home computer

On the other side of the room is your desk with one of the most important pieces of technology in the game: the teleradio. It might look like a TV, but it actually is much closer to a PC, running its own operating system and with built-in networking capabilities! Every time you are tasked with a mission, you'll get a call on the teleradio. You sit down there, carefully listening to your instructions. You can make sure you understand it completely on a summary screen, and off you go, to the cockpit to do a good job!
A marvel of technology: the teleradio.

It's booomin time!

Finally you'll move over to the cockpit, the heart of the bunker. Your first step in fulfilling your mission is to boot up all systems. Please note that anything I'm sharing in these screenshots is up to change, especially on the cockpit. We are still heavy in development and we are improving, replacing and adding many things. The whole interior will also change over the span of the campaign you experience as a player, but more on that in a future devlog.
Your workstation, the cockpit, asleep before the mission. The cockpit itself is made up of several modules. Over time you'll get new modules, improve existing ones, replace some of them or even lose some modules due to unexpected incidents. The modules belong to one of these categories: [olist]

Energy generation

Weapon systems

Information and detection systems [/olist] All of these are really big topics that very much deserve their own devlogs in the future. I'll only very briefly touch on each. [h4]Energy generation[/h4] To generate energy, you fire up whatever energy generation system you have available. In this case it's a hydroelectric one, providing a quite stable inflow of energy, only being limited by the water level of the reservoir. Your system also comes with a battery, enabling you to cover surges of energy consumption that go higher than what you can directly produce. You'll want to look out though, to not produce too much energy when the battery is already full! Nothing bad happens directly, but you'll waste a limited resource which can mean your energy supply is low in the last part of the mission.
The ecological way to fire an enormous cannon: renewable energy sources. [h4]Weapon systems[/h4] While you start with only one weapon system, over time you'll get more options to attack the invading forces and defend your bunker, and in consequence your planet. The weapons are all quite distinct, each serving a different purpose. Over time you can expect the enemy to recognise weaknesses in your existing weapons and adapt their attack plan and fleet. In return you will be equipped with new weapon systems that are capable of handling the changed threats. We'll share more details in a future devlog, for today we'll just do a tour of the bunker.
The centerpiece of the cockpit featuring the weapon selection, some information systems as well as a module for the currently selected kinetic projectile. [h4]Information and detection systems[/h4] Lastly we have all the modules that help you find, identify, and track the enemy ships. This task is NOT trivial - especially later in the game, when the enemy will try to trick you or conceal itself from you in various ways. In PVKK you are not just a grunt shooting a big gun and being happy about it going boom (though that is quite fun). You need to be a smart professional, know your systems, and execute orders with a calm precision - just like an experienced pilot. The first step towards this is to understand the current situation within the airspace, so you can form a battle plan accordingly. You need to prioritize the right targets, and pick the right tool for the situation. No matter how strong a weapon is, if it is used in the wrong situation it will simply do nothing (except waste materials and time). You know how they say "measure twice, cut once" in woodworking? It's similar for PVKK, where you'd rather spend an extra 10 seconds to verify your plan than spend another 60s on a shot because your first one failed.
You combine several tools to form as complete a picture as you can. If you look carefully, you can see three representations of the incoming ship at once.

This ends the tour for today

These were the basics of our bunker. We did not cover every element of the bunker, nor the activities you can do between missions. As with many things, these are better suited for a future devlog. Some of them are also simply not properly in the game yet, so we could at best show some drawings. By the way, the funniest comment I heard of someone seeing this bunker for the first time was "hey, this is easily 4000 euros rent without heating, in the city of Munich". The view is great in any case, and i guess you have no annoying neighbors, which is a plus. If you want to chat with others about PVKK, ask us questions directily or bring in your feedback and ideas, please join our Discord. That's it from me! Best Wishes, Ren

Thank you for reading, see you in Devlog #2!

[ 2025-02-12 13:55:58 CET ] [ Original post ]