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HI-FI DESTRUCTION - PATH OF THE FURON DEVELOPER DIARY

Sandblast Games talk about destruction in Destroy All Humans! Path Of The Furon

Jon Knoles, Creative Director at Sandblast Games...

“I’ve got your close encounter right HERE!” - Crypto

The most important ingredient in a game like Destroy All Humans! Path of the Furon, besides a heavy dose of irreverent humor, is destruction. It’s always been important to the series. After all, it’s in the title! Our goal was to deliver a high fidelity level of destruction on a scale that’s never been seen before in a video game. But “Massive Destruction” and “Destructible Worlds” are terms we hear a lot these days. How is our destruction going to be different than what’s been done before? How is this “hi-fi” destruction going to be fun? Good questions we had to answer before setting out to take the series to next-generation consoles.

How is Destruction Fun?

In the beginning, the team wrestled with this question. Yeah, we have to make our destruction look “next-gen”, and our cities need to be bigger and grander, but how does that add to the moment-by-moment fun factor, or increase the level of player engagement and satisfaction? Well, the answer to that is: every single thing that provides positive player feedback and rewards your moment-by-moment destructive actions adds to fun. Conversely, when you perform a destructive action expecting a result or reward and you don’t get it, you are not having fun. We want players to feel like everything they do has a tangible, visceral effect on the world every moment they’re destroying it, and reward them for it, whether in open sandbox play or on a directed mission.

Brainstorming “Next-gen” Destruction

We started by brainstorming ideas around Crypto (the alien) ground-based game play, which is focused more on comedy and manipulating or destroying humans, and flying saucer air-based game play, which is focused on air-to-air combat and massive destruction of entire cities. You can damage or destroy everything in this game in many different ways: people, cars, tanks, helicopters, plastic garden flamingos, you name it. But, the real challenge for us was to create a city with a hundred or more buildings that never fade or pop in whether on foot or flying and are fully destructible. How the hell were we going to do that?

Before defining the look & feel of building destruction in concept art and prototyping, we needed to decide how we wanted to destroy them. If you were an alien hell-bent on vaporizing a city with your flying saucer, what tools would you want to have at your disposal? What would you expect your weapons do to the world? What flying saucer weapons from the first two games would we want to re-imagine, what new ones would we want to create? From those brainstorm sessions, we generated loads of destructive ideas. Here’s a few that made it into the game:

Rapid fire plasma cannons inspired by real-world military aircraft guns, but dialed way up.
Seeking fireballs that punch through one side of a building and explode out the other to chase down targets.
A mass abduction beam to vacuum up scores of humans that pour out of buildings when you attack them, flocking in groups like panicked sheep.
A black hole that sucks everything around it into another dimension (this started as a Saucer weapon, but actually became Crypto’s most destructive hand weapon).
Create a giant tornado and steer its path of destruction or let it wander on its own.

Here are some ideas we decided against pursuing, as fun or funny as some of them sounded:

Turn the edge of the Saucer into a giant buzz-saw and drive right through buildings.
De-molecularize (is that a word?) buildings, making them vanish into thin air.
Clamp a pair of giant 70s style headphones to a building and shake it to death with disco.
Someone even suggested we could “scare” a building into running away on its own “feet.”

Once we settled on an arsenal of far out and super-destructive Saucer weapons, we then focused on figuring out how they would each provide a unique feeling and result on the world and what those results should look and & feel like, knowing we couldn’t build a custom building destruction system for each weapon, certainly not on the massive scale we were aiming for.

Realistic or Fantastic Destruction?

As we studied real-world building demolitions and implosions or watched the more fantastic Hollywood disaster movie destruction, we realized that we all have built-in expectations for what building destruction should look like. In the real world, buildings collapse or implode into a cloud of dust under their own weight, no fiery explosions. In Hollywood, they blast outward into a million tiny pieces with big gaseous fireball explosions. A blend of the two, weighted more on the Hollywood side (well, not the “million pieces of debris part”), seemed to be the best approach aesthetically and well as technically: fiery explosions and debris, followed by a satisfying and believable structural collapse.

High-Fidelity Destruction

Due to the sheer scale and fidelity of building destruction required for Path Of The Furon, we developed a custom procedural building construction tool with a built-in destruction system, which incorporates physics, weapon damage shaders, and procedural mesh “shearing” algorithms to provide critical player feedback in two basic phases: the damage phase and the collapse phase.

Damage phase - During this phase, the player uses his weapons to deal damage to the building and ultimately cause it to collapse. Building damage is conveyed through a procedural layered shader system. This system leaves visible weapon scarring damage and disintegrates the outer “skin” of the building, revealing the damaged interior behind it, which utilizes parallax mapping to provide added depth. This method of scarring also has volumetric falloff, so that huge weapons as wide as a city block like the Tornadotron’s giant twister and the Quantum Deconstructor blasts cause more intense damage at the epicenter, and “feather” outward to fine cracks at the fringes. This scarring system is also applied to terrain. Because the scarring is persistent, you can doodle or write your name or whatever on buildings or the terrain. On top of all this, and as an added gameplay reward for destruction, a crowd flocking A.I. system ensures steady streams of panicked humans flee from buildings you attack.

Collapse phase - The collapse phase is the big, satisfying visual payoff for the player when a building is destroyed. Once you cause enough damage to a building, the building floors explode from the top down in flashy disaster movie effects fashion, triggering a fatal collapse. You hear the creaking metal, the glass shatter, and you see the building start to give way. In addition to a myriad of particle effects, smoke and debris, we use procedural building damage shaders to dynamically crack the skin of the building from the point of the fatal blow outward, and the building geometry dynamically collapses in on itself differently depending on where the final blow was dealt. If you destroy the corner of the building, it will collapse from that corner first; if you destroy the building’s center, the middle of the building will start to fall, followed by the corners. If you detonate a massive explosion between four buildings, they all start cracking and collapsing from the corners closest to the explosion.

World destruction is persistent, so you can lay waste to an entire city of 100 or even 200 buildings– that is until you start a new mission or you quit and return later. We have to bring things back, because there wouldn’t be much replay value if there was nothing left to destroy!

“Hey Pox, remember that time we disintegrated Parvo-6? When it was all over, we didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' brain stem. The smell, you know. Smelled like...sausage.” – Crypto