Hello and welcome to our second devlog!
I'm Raffa from Bippinbits, and in this devlog I’ll 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 PVKK’s fantasy is the joy of experimenting with your cockpit - pressing buttons, seeing what happens - without being spoon-fed information. It’s 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 console’s 3D mesh. A task that’s 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