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Hello and welcome to our sixth devlog!

\nIm Lander, Im an artist and I help out Raffa with making PVKK look pretty. Contrary to our previous devlogs that dived into the philosophy and approach of different aspects of the game, Ill be diving into a slightly more [strike]nerdy [/strike]technical direction, but not to worry, I will share eye-candy throughout this post as a treat for you enduring my unsolicited rambling!\n\nIll show you a little bit of the recent work Ive done for the game, and with that Ill share some (surprising) insights on how the game is rendered.\n\n

Its all totally real, I promise

\nBecause we want to build a world that you can completely lose yourself in, this world needs to feel truly real. Immersion and believability have a big impact on how a player may experience the game and make decisions, especially when those decisions have impactful moral connotations. Making things feel real means making things like switches and buttons and gears feel like they have weight, and it means making an environment that looks like it could exist in the real world.\n\nBeyond incredible audio and a great story, visuals of course also play a big part in making this world believable.\n\n

Actually, everything is fake and nothing is real

\nJust like in audio (See Devlog #4: The sound of PVKK ), there is a distinction between believability and creating things as they are in real life. In the world of game development were always battling against a mountain of technical limitations that are rooted in making sure games run nice and smoothly. We want things to look pretty though, so we need to find solutions to these technical constraints. Often these solutions take the shape of something akin to optical illusions: We make something look real and believable through a bunch of tricks and hacks.\n\nRainy mood in PVKK.\n\nFor example, when its raining in a videogame you might see hundreds to thousands of raindrops fall down every few seconds, but simulating each and every raindrop would make your computer not-so-happy. We need to fake this somehow, and one way to do so would be to place a few transparent textures of raindrops in the level that continuously scroll downwards, add some fog, make surfaces look more shiny, add a droplets texture to the windows, and there we go: we have the illusion of rain. Instead of truly simulating each raindrop, like rain in the real world, we fake it in a way that makes it look believable and convincing.\n\nThat is a fairly specific example of course, but this concept in general is a huge aspect of the art of game development: finding creative solutions to circumvent technical limitations.\n\nNow, with that in mind, Ill let you in on a little secret: The bunker doesnt exist in the same world as the world you see when you look outside of the bunker.\nIn a very similar way to real flight simulators (And the immersive PVKK experience well be bringing to Gamescom ), where a physical cockpit is built and surrounded by a projection of a virtual world, when you look outside the bunker youll see a projection of the outdoor world.\n\nYou can imagine this as the bunker being completely surrounded by a greenscreen, and much like greenscreens in movies, a virtual world is then projected on that greenscreen.\n\nIllustration showing how the bunker world is separated from the outside world.\n\nScreenshot from the bunker, in reality it isnt literally a greenscreen, but this helps to illustrate the idea. :)\n\nThere are a few reasons we do this. Firstly it prevents effects like explosions (such as the one that happens when you press the button that makes the cannon go pew), rain, fog, etc, from clipping through the walls and windows of the bunker, since all those effects happen on the greenscreen. Generally it is tricky to prevent these types of effects from going through glass or walls without big performance costs, and this approach works very nicely in our situation to mitigate those issues. If we didn\'t, the bunker would essentially leak.\n\nLeaky bunker. Not very cozy\n\nSecondly it gives us a lot of control over effects like lighting in the bunker. Each lighting scenario we have in the game is meticulously created so the bunker feels cozy, having the interior separated from the exterior helps us a lot with this.\n\n

Let there be light!

\nJust like building a real optical illusion, we need to make sure there is nothing breaking the illusion, and until recently we did have some issues breaking it.\n\nDue to our approach of separating the indoor and outdoor into separate scenes, the bunker doesnt automatically receive light from the exterior, and in some situations things look Well How do I put this delicately? Not quite right:\n\nBunker exterior light progress screenshot 1/3.\n\nIn this image the sun is behind the mountain, and we can see the rest of the facility itself is not in direct sunlight, so logically there should not be any sunlight hitting the bunker walls and the window.\n\nWe needed to create a secondary lighting setup, one that mimics the light from the outdoor scene (Remember the bunker and outdoor scene are separated worlds) so the exterior walls of the bunker receive the correct shadows and light.\n\nThe first step towards resolving this was making sure the mountains in the outside scene cast a shadow on the bunker.\n\nBunker exterior light progress screenshot 2/3.\n\nThat fixes a big discrepancy, we dont see a strange highlight on the window frame anymore, and the direct sunlight on the outdoor wall is gone, but now the wall turned pitch-black, which is also not what we want. We need to take the ambient light from the outside world, and apply it to the bunkers exterior:\n\nBunker exterior light progress screenshot 3/3.\n\n and there we go, the bunker feels grounded and like a part of the rest of the facility, while at the same time we still retain complete control over the lighting and mood on the inside.\n\n

Ok, thats cool and all, but sometimes you gotta remove the light

\nAnother element taking up a big chunk of your screen\'s real-estate in the game is the landscape. While the landscape looked quite nice already, there was one big issue with it making our lighting options very limited: The landscape texture had shadows embedded into it. This meant that wed have two sets of shadows, one set thats baked into the texture, and one set created by the in-game sun itself.\n\n\nWe mitigated this issue up until now by positioning the sun in such a way this was not very obvious (i.e. so that the in-game shadows would sort of line up with the terrains shadows), but this was definitely something that needed fixing as it severely restricted our freedom with how we could light the scene.\n\nI took this as an opportunity to rework our landscape shader, placing the outdoor visuals in a much nicer and more versatile spot compared to before.\n\nA before and after screenshot of the landscape improvements.\n\nThe in-game lighting is the exact same in these before and after screenshots, but it looks very different:\n

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• On the right side of the image you can see how in the before screenshot the mountain-side is unusually dark, it almost looks like it was scorched. Thats that shadow baked into the texture. Notice how in the after image we can see the sunlight nicely lights it up.\n
• On the left side of the image, around the city, we can see a bunch of little shapes of light show up. We can actually see the sun hit mountain ridges now, and we can see the sunlight reflect on some wet patches of land.\n
• The snowy mountain tops interact much more realistically with light now, making them brighter and stand out more against the darker terrain.\n

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Thats all :)

\nI hope this shows you that were taking a lot of care to make this world feel real and immersive, so you can live out your deepest and most primal desire of becoming the best Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant there ever was.\n\nKeep in mind that everything Ive shown you here is still a work in progress.\n\nNow, before I let you go, Ill give you one more screenshot, just because youve managed to endure all my rambling. You deserve it.\n\nScreenshot of a nighttime mood.\n\nThanks for taking the time to read all this. I hope you found some of the bits I shared here interesting and that you managed to stay awake reading this.\n\nAnd I hope you have a very lovely day!\n\n- Lander :)\n\nPs: We have a Discord server that you should totally join if youre not there yet. \n

[ 2025-08-16 13:08:08 CET ] [Original Post]