The future of physics is bright, thanks to a new game that looks set to push things to
the next level. Teardown is an upcoming game that does away
with traditional techniques and instead builds its worlds out of VOXELS. But with physics,
buoyancy and all the other things required to make them behave the way you’d expect
for them to behave. The result is a world that acts like the real-world!
Only more blocky. This game is being developed by Dennis Gustafsson, who you can follow on
twitter under the name ‘tuxedolabs’. He seems like a one-man army who’s a master
of all sorts of cutting-edge technologies, all of which he’s lovingly cramming into
this one title. Teardown’s selling point might be its physics but everything about
it seems cutting edge: the audio, the lighting, the volumetric effects etc. It is indeed shaping
up to be an extremely exciting project that I can’t wait to get my hands on. But I’m
not just going to use this video to scream at the physics in this game with fake-sounding
enthusiasm. I’ll save that for my spare time, thank you very much. Instead, I’m
going to go through the progress reports he’s posted on twitter, as it will help you to
get a feel for how this project has evolved since its inception. Conception. Whatever.
He started with other games. One that comes to mind is Smash Hit, a mobile game from 2014.
Despite all this, it already had cutting-edge, procedural damage. It’s here we see hints
to his obsession with destruction. Fast-forward to late 2017 and he was busy
messing about with lighting and lobbing glowy orbs at trains. As you do.
This phase lasted through till early 2018 and then he began work on reflections.
And then depth of field. He cleverly switched to raytracing in a warped
space to give more love to the centre of the screen, and less to the edges where people
don’t notice stuff as much. Eventually, he had done it- he had developed
a room, fully lit in real-time and littered with physics blocks everywhere. Having peaked
so soon, what else was there to do?... Then, SUDDENLY, out of nowhere less than a
month later on June 13th, 2018, he posted a video of a fully destructible house, and
with it, Teardown’s journey as a recognisable game about physics began. Even in this early
state, the building could be smashed apart and bits no longer connected to everything
else would collapse convincingly. By the end of the month, that house had become
a village. He optimised the piles of debris and had added sound effects to give it all
a satisfying, creepy atmosphere. And just like that, it already had better physics than
most game out there. Over the coming weeks and months he posted more videos of more destruction
in more elaborate looking environments, no doubt thanks to his past obsessions and experiments.
He then decided to prove a colleague wrong by showing how bad a lighting system based
on voxels would be. In the process he made an awesome lighting system based on voxels,
full of beams of light and stuff. It then all took an interesting and dark turn,
as he moved it to a film noir style. He experimented with volumetric fog, which
may not sound that important in a game about destruction but as he carves his way through
a building the rooms fill up in thick dust and beautiful beams of light.
He then added explosives! I’m impressed by how restrained he was with these- sure,
they would blow out a sizeable chunk of the room, but what impressed me most was how they
interacted with the debris from previous explosions. As to be expected from him by now, he did
the unexpected by jumping to something completely different, programming in sinister, procedurally
animated people who could respond to noises in an eerily convincing manner. As we all
know, this isn’t the route the project ultimately went down, but I feel in an alternate reality
somewhere, this game took a sinister and spooky route.
Within weeks he was putting major studios to shame by developing AI that could navigate
a fully destructible environment. This stuff was incredible!
…so naturally, all this stuff magically disappeared again as he moved back to working
on the physics, adding different materials and bigger explosions to his project. I particularly
like this one, where an explosion smashes the walls and cracks the outer plaster in
a super juicy way. The physics reached another important milestone
in December of 2018 as he added ‘plastic’ joints to simulate- you guessed it- …wood.
This is a big improvement! Stuff is no longer simply static until it’s destroyed. It will
twist and warp, bend and deform. It behaves more like real stuff, in the process becoming
even better than the stuff in Red Faction Guerrilla!
Also he discovered this voxel stuff made simulating buoyancy super easy, as demonstrated in this
splashy sploshy bangy wangy example just here. A little unrelated to the game, but perhaps
fundamental to understanding his genius, he and a fellow person discussed how rubbish
raytracing looked in real life, and no doubt came up with a dozen ways to integrate this
into their projects in some misunderstood yet genius way.
It’s here that he began to obsess about noise. Believe me, I’ve read and re-read
his blog about the stuff. I even skimmed it on Wikipedia, so I’m something of an expert.
But even I don’t quite understand the complexities and trade-offs that different ‘colours’
of noise bring. But it sounds as though he’s a fan of blue
noise combined with the golden ratio to make for the finest quality noise, just for us!
He uses this together with TAA to remove speckles from water and reflections.
Rather ominously, he did tweet that if you think RTX sounds expensive, voxels are worse!
Maybe hold off upgrading for a bit. Just in case.
By early 2019 it was starting to take shape as the thing it is today. The hammer was added,
the audio was given super realistic acoustic modelling and it pretty much became a functioning
game, albeit without purpose… aside from BLOWING STUFF UP!
From here the project went from strength to strength. By March he had added driveable
vehicles that could be ploughed through the buildings, and which would sustain damage
themselves. A few weeks later he added planks to repair
the damage inflicted, but he discovered it was more fun to construct completely new structures
out of them instead. He even discovered that he could nail them
to GIANT SPIDERS. Oh, didn’t mention it? He added GIANT SPIDERS to the game. They follow
you and try to fit through doorways and their super spindly legs get everywhere, in VR it
would probably feel like they’re probing into your mouth and stuff. I’m happy I don’t
have a phobia of spiders, even after that incident where I accidentally rubbed one across
my body and it bit me several times. So I can only imagine how horrifying this is for
its maker, Dennis, who claims he has arachnophobia. Perhaps somewhat thankfully, in one of his
many u-turns, these spiders suddenly disappeared from the game again as he turned his focus
to volumetric smoke that interacts with the surroundings. He cruelly trapped it under
a board, before shooting small holes in it to let bits of it escape. I mean this could
be a game as well couldn’t it, where you’re a fireman who has to enter burning buildings
and extinguish the fires at their source before they reach strategically placed explosive
barrels dotted all over the place. This guy sees the good in everything, doesn’t
he? With a back-handed compliment he wonders if he could use the rubbishy twitter video
compression to denoise the smoke effects in his game. Next-gen strat.
By August he had procedurally generated buildings, so the PC does the hard work and he just knocks
it all down again. Kind of the opposite way around to normal computer programming if you
think about it. September saw these stringy, bouncy cables.
It’s cool enough to see them interacting with the wooden posts, but he then posted
another video where he hooked them to the back of a truck, pulled it back like a slingshot,
then let it go. If you think that projectile should have done
more damage, you’re not alone. Dennis says he’s disabled damage from these things because
of performance reasons… but will hopefully add it automatically later on.
And then he took a break from the carnage to add spray-paint. Whatever will this madlad
do next?! In October, he uploaded a youtube video, announcing
the game, ‘Teardown’. With these physics, he chose to make it a
game where you needed to collect keycards dotted across a level. The catch being that,
after taking the first one, you only had limited time to get the rest ‘before security arrives’.
The trick is not pick up your first keycard until you’ve destroyed and altered the level
in such a way that will allow you to move between the rest of the keycards as quickly
as possible. I like this, cos it means you can spend unlimited time dicking about in
the level if you choose to. But what’s this about ‘security’? Are we talking guards?
SPIDERS?!?! Also, you have guns. It sounds like there’s more to the action than simply
destroying things. But he’s keeping quiet about this.
…Apart from in a video he released just after showing an EVIL HELICOPTER, shooting
holes through the place they’re supposed to protect. Even AI can’t resist the destruction
in this game, it seems! And he’s continued his work on the vehicles,
crushing them, using them after they’ve been crushed, showing at least a hundred reasons
why he should never be given control of an articulated lorry, and lastly how to get skidmarks
on walls whilst burying into the ground… AT THE SAME TIME!
And, at the end of November, it was shown at Dreamhack winter where it was labelled
as ‘Best Strategy’. What’s next for this game?
Well, you can follow his progress on Twitter, on the website, on the steam page, or you
can subscribe to him on Youtube right here. The game is due out in 2020. I wish him all
the best and can’t wait to tear down the game he’s spent years lovingly building
up.