Hello and welcome to our third devlog!
I'm Luca from Bippinbits, and in this devlog, I'll address some of the juicy questions regarding gameplay.
If you’ve seen the exclusive early gameplay footage from IGN (see below) or had the chance to play at Gamescom 2024, you might have been left with a large question:
You get to fire the massive cannon…
and then what?
- What will the combat look like after I’ve learned the basics?
- Do we get different weapons?
- More upgrades?
- Advanced enemies?
In short: yes; More upgrades, more enemies, and more weapons.
It’s a bit too early for us to reveal the specifics, but I’m happy to share some of our key takeaways on combat and how we’re designing it.
Defending your home will not be simple or easy.
There's a reason why a delicious, warm cup of tea always comes after the battle: you need to earn it. You are expected to learn and master a multitude of devices that need to work smoothly together in order to defeat the enemy. In the end, all the enemy needs is one shot to land, and your bunker will be destroyed. You need to survive every single attack.
Invaders will adapt.
Shoot me once, shame on you. Shoot me twice…
It might take a few large (say, 10 meters in diameter) gaping holes in a hull to make them reconsider, but even the most stubborn invader will learn to reconsider their actions in due time.
One thing that we have learned from history is that war is always the seed for innovation.
You win by constantly outsmarting your opponent, so both sides are forced to react and adapt continuously.
When we are designing and developing the combat in PVKK, we need to think about it as a war where we are fighting and engineering on both sides. It needs to be an arms race that produces the best possible combat experience.
So, how do we do it?
- Experiment with many different ideas quickly to see what works, what's fun, and what's exciting. Not only weapons and ammunition, but also upgrades, peripherals, ship augments, and much more.
- Take into consideration how the enemy would react to these changes, and prototype the reactions directly too.
- Throw away ideas that don’t work and double down on the ones that do.
That means a lot of prototyping and testing is needed.
How can we do this efficiently, given our small team?
While building a real-life functioning replica is something we have considered, our wallet (and probably local governments) are not so fond of the idea.*
Let me show you the tool we use instead:
The 2D cockpit simulator
For every cockpit weapon and module we could think of, we first built a simple 2D version of it.
Similarly to aviation engineering, we test, simulate, and iterate as much as possible in a virtual space before stepping up.
Disclaimer for all keen-eyed members of the rebellion: All unannounced features visible above are in development and may be removed in the future as per the process above.
This allows us to skip all the time-intensive steps involving 3D models until we are confident about a new module and the implications it will have for the complete design. Similarly, we can test new enemy ships and their technological advancements.
It also allows us to create, test, and iterate entire level sequences and “phases” of the arms races before fastening a single virtual bolt.
Once we are happy with what we built in 2D, we transfer it into the 3D cockpit and validate that it still works. The key difference here is that in 2D, you can easily see and reach every module. In 3D, you might have to turn your head, or you might not be able to see two modules at the same time due to their orientation. That means the first task in this transfer is to figure out where to place a module.
A relic from the past
As many of you have pointed out, a massive cannon is clearly not the best weapon to defend against an interplanetary offensive. Then why on Earth is it there?
Well, besides the fact that it’s incredibly fun to use, it’s a relic from another era.
When a civilization is suddenly thrust into a new kind of war, what do they do?
They fall back on what worked before. Old tech gets dusted off and retooled while the engineers scramble to invent the next big thing. It’s a familiar story—charging into the future with weapons of the past. Like sending cavalry into the trenches of a war no one was ready for.
Your mission is to survive, adapt, and make the most of the cannon until new upgrades and weapons help you turn the tide of war.
Whether you succeed or not will be decided by your actions and your choices.
Have some cool ideas or references you want to share with us?
Join the official PVKK Discord!
The pvkk-ideas-and-wishes and pvkk-deep-talk channels are there exactly to discuss potential armaments/improvements or other topics. We read every message there and consider it our main source of feedback.
Thank you for reading!
- Luca
*For legal reasons: We promise we did not consider building a massive space cannon IRL!