Industry Direct by Will Cloxton at Vankrupt Games

Industry Direct is our program for sponsors who want to speak directly to the Road to VR newsletter audience. Industry Direct posts are written by sponsors with no involvement from the Road to VR editorial team. Links to these posts appear only in our newsletter and do not intermix with our on-site editorial feed. Industry Direct sponsors help make Road to VR possible.

Pavlov is a team-based multiplayer VR shooter with over 65 fully interactable weapons and limitless game modes is supported by a passionate and extensive modding community. On November 14th, 2023, Vankrupt Games released multiplayer FPS tactical shooter game Pavlov Shack onto the official Meta Quest store for the Quest 3, 2, and Pro for $19.99. This official release is bringing a lot more to the table than just 3 new official maps, bug fixes, and voice chat fidelity improvements. It also brings a new and improved mod kit: Pavlov Mod Kit 3.0.

With the new and improved mod kit on the official Quest Store version of Pavlov Shack, content creators can more easily share and implement their modded creations for the game. Now, content can be broken up into different content types such as Maps, Gamemodes, and Mods. It essentially decouples the content into more appropriate categories. More importantly, it allows more cross-pollination for multiple creators to implement each other’s work.

Modding is arguably the heart and soul of the Pavlov Shack community. Pavlov exploded on the PC scene in 2017 on Steam and was one of the first titles in the VR market to embrace User Generated Content. Players could download Unreal Engine 4 and create content easily. This original implementation spawned an explosion in content, from custom maps to custom game modes.

Downloading content, however, used to be a pain with Pavlov’s early versions. You had to manually install the maps or rely on community servers for delivering the downloads to your headset. This isn’t ideal, as different servers would have different versions of the maps. Earlier this year, Pavlov Shack included a massive update that shifted from Unreal 4 to Unreal 5, but also included Mod.io support and a mod browser in-game to manage and download your content more gracefully.

There was a catch however, everything had to be contained in one UGC map file. Sharing content between creators was a painful process of zipping up projects entirely or exporting as plugins for other creators to download and implement with their own content.

With these new mod kit improvements, a creator who specializes in map design and struggles with using visual blueprint logic can now more easily set another mod or gamemode as a dependency, allowing them to implement the content from that other creator much more fluidly. It also provides the benefit of removing the versioning headaches. If a dependency is updated, such as a custom vehicle with a bug fix, then all subscribed content to that custom vehicle will receive the same update. Less sharing of zipped files and all the distribution is seamless.

We value our mod and map creators because it enriches the player experience by being able to generate unique and novel content at a much faster rate than Vankrupt Games could ever hope to achieve. Ultimately, this benefits the players and enriches the creators with the satisfaction they have access to a large player base to play their content. For example, popular mods like ‘Pavlov Kart’ puts players into a Pavlov meets Mario Kart world that is a unique experience created just for the Pavlov community by the Pavlov community. Due to improvements in Pavlov Shack’s mod kit 3.0, players are the true winners, as they will benefit from more and better game content.

Content can also be stacked on each other and multiple mod packs from different creators can be applied at once in unison. Additionally, the assets for those modpacks only need to be downloaded once, so content adopting the same mod dependencies also have the added benefit of reducing duplication of asset bloat, saving that precious storage space on the player’s headset.

The implications of this drastic change will take quite a bit of time to bear fruit, but the modding landscape of Pavlov Shack will look completely different in a year once the content creators shift to the new and more practical methods and understand the nuance of what can now be possible.

This new modding system is now live with Pavlov Shack, with PC following in a later update. Download Pavlov Shack today on the official Meta Quest Store.