Instruments of Destruction News

A new game update is still many weeks away, but I wanted to give a report on the status of the game. I've been jumping between a few different areas of work, with the biggest two being figuring out the campaign mission plan and adding new biomes. I've done other work, like a bit of optimization and improving the streak particle drawing, and I'll talk a little more about the main two tasks. But first a small caveat:

If you want to fully enjoy the game and aren't really into building vehicles, I'd wait to play the game until 1.0 is finished. You can still safely buy the game now since it's on sale, and the price won't this low again until next summer, but the campaign will be *way* better in a few months.

CAMPAIGN MISSION PLAN

Before figuring out the full campaign mission plan, I had to narrow down what Instruments of Destruction is really about, what makes it unique. And it comes down to 3 things: Vehicles, Destruction, and Physics. Those are quite obvious, but focusing on those 3 aspects as the pillars has really helped me figure out how to create a cohesive plan for the missions. This game has too many potential directions to go in, and I needed something to help me get past the decision paralysis that I had been feeling.

Then I used a spreadsheet and just wrote down every mission idea, vehicle, scenario, physics highlight, or other element that I might want to highlight in a mission. I started a second sheet and started copying and organizing these ideas into groups of missions. I'm trying to make each mission semi-unique and fun/satisfying, and trying to emphasize at least 2 of the 3 pillars, if not all 3. Some secondary ideas and previous missions/vehicles will be used as challenges instead of a primary mission.

A third sheet was added so I could make to focus on Build & Destroy campaign missions. Not everything is planned out precisely, but I have a plan for how everything fits together, and I'm nearly ready to start working on missions.



NEW BIOMES

Recently I've been really enjoying working on adding more atmosphere-enhancing elements to the game, such as the new ambient animals, improved skyboxes, rain/thunder. These things don't directly impact the 3 pillars, but they help make the game more immersive and satisfying (to me at least). When I was working on the mission plan, one thing that bothered me was not having enough biomes for all the different groups of missions (each 4-5 missions has a general theme/focus).

So I started adding some new particle settings, and new tree types, and new rocks, and friction for the ground, and a couple other things, and before I knew it I have a bunch of new biomes. I'm not going to reveal them all, and I have to think about if I want to hide a few of them in the map editor (until version 1.0's campaign is beaten).

The ice biome above shows off some of the new stuff, including low-friction ground, snow-pebbles instead of grass, falling snow, and some new trees/rocks. And because of the low friction in particular, it plays a bit different as well. [Friction isn't the only way the biomes affect gameplay.]

HOLIDAY BREAK

I'm taking a week or two off for the holiday break, but after that I'm looking forward to making lots of progress on the game and pushing towards 1.0 in the first half of 2024. If I had to guess on a date for 1.0 on Steam, I'd say March or April is the most likely. I'm not great at estimating times, so we'll see how accurate that is.

Added thunder storm system and added to a couple missions (Tentalces Incoming and A Sticky Box)
Added Option to disable mouse controls
Added Option to disable animals
Added Option to disable lightning/thunder
Added ambient sound loops to main campaign missions
Added 6 more horn sounds to the Speaker Basic part
Added "Startle Radius" option to Speaker Basic part (distance to scare animals when activated)
Changed grass rendering to make it appear a bit shinier, particularly when raining
Reduced BND mission 3 to two towers instead of four
Fixed tires receiving torque from vehicle after vehicle explodes
Fixed debris parts from destroyable entities sticking around
Fixed tutorials showing Space instead of Enter as the button to push to start game
Changed automobiles to have slightly staggered explosions (feels much better)
Removed Kraken from non-normal missions (in data)

This is a slightly smaller list of changes, but an important update. No changelist this time, but each change needs a few words, so here we go.

SKY IMPROVEMENTS

I messed with some volumetric clouds, and they looked pretty good, but not worth the performance hit (about 1ms on my PC). Just using nice high-res textures turned out to work the best, with no real performance hit and a nice visual improvement. I tried messing with different visual styles of clouds, but realistic ones seemed to fit the best. The sun/moon is also now visible as a very bright sphere. If you look towards it, the post-processing adjusts appropriately. Overall, this was a nice bang-for-the-buck improvement in making the world feel better (it's also the reason why this update is 100+mb in size). There are a few things left for the UI/etc that need touching up, but this is one of the last in-world tweaks before 1.0.

MOUSE CONTROLS

This was a not-too-complex task that required balancing a lot of different issues, so there's a little clunkiness in how you make a vehicle use mouse controls. But I think the result is a good compromise. Basically this dialog handles all the mouse controls.



The majority of that dialog controls how the X/Y axis function and which controls/inputs they override. The bottom part controls which controls/inputs the mouse buttons override. Except they don't override anything, they share/piggyback on existing controls. Originally I had mouse buttons mapping normally, but this made for some awkward issues, especially for those who use Orbit cam instead of Follow cam. Instead everything mouse-related is on this popup, and the mouse controls only function when you 1) use follow cam and 2) are not using a gamepad.

I switched some of the mission vehicles to use mouse controls (the ones that fire something), but aside from Hover Hornet I think using the keyboard remains identical to before. That vehicle I felt ok changing because it never controlled great with keyboard in the first place (it's always been far better with gamepad).

SPACEBAR CHANGE!

This is a side-effect of having mouse support. I decided it was time to switch the main shortcut for starting/ending the game to ENTER instead of SPACE. The mission vehicles will be changing soon to use SPACE as the main fire/action button, and LEFT SHIFT as the main turbo/boost button. This should make the game a bit easier to pick up and play for new players.

LOGIC CODE CHANGE

Some logic stuff, particularly with things that toggle, has always been a bit buggy. I decided it was time to bite the bullet and change anything with part controls/logic that's not visual to use the same code path, and it seems to have worked. I have tested a lot of different vehicles and things seem to be working as expected (aka better than before), but please let me know if you see any logic-related glitches/etc. A link to the Steam Workshop vehicle always helps :)

[Logic also no longer runs in Build Mode. It was still doing so for a few parts.]

STEAM WORKSHOP FIX

I fixed the issue with Workshop Vehicles not having their creator names showing up (and maybe sometimes showing the wrong vehicle name). It was an easier fix than I expected, sorry that took so long.

PART COLORS

New part colors now make a little more sense. If you change the color of a part, that's the color any new part will have. It no longer cares about any parts you may have selected/highlighted, only if you changed colors. I think it also changes the default if you assign new colors in the Edit Palette menu, but that feels ok to leave as is.

NEXT UPDATE PLANS

The next update will be coming...I don't know when, sorry. I'll be working on more turrets/enemies/etc starting tomorrow, and more missions soon. It may be January before the next significant update. I'm looking forward to making lots of fun/varied missions, and development has gone pretty well the last month or so. But estimating/predicting how that will go is difficult to do with any accuracy. A new release date trailer will be coming in January/February when I have a better idea of how long it'll take to finish the game.

Instruments of Destruction takes place on small islands, mostly for technical reasons. I've been thinking about adding something to the islands since 2020, but didn't find the time to do it until now. That something is the animal you see/hear on basically any island or near most large bodies of water: Seagulls. Islands without birds seem lifeless, which they literally are (sorry plants).



Seagulls aren't the only new lifeform, as sea turtles are also now chilling on beaches. Both new ambient creatures are generated/placed procedurally when you start playing, so you won't see them in build mode. I may still tweak how they behave/react, but they are pretty interactive right now. There's a set number per island, and that can be adjusted in the map editor (along with a couple beach parameters relating to turtle locations). There can be up to 400 total creatures, though nothing comes close to that currently.

[At first the turtles were going to be crabs, and they were kinda working, but they were just too creepy. Turtles seem to fit much better.]

Though these creatures have no real impact on gameplay currently, that may change with some bonus missions in the future. And even without a true gameplay impact, the game/world feels a bit empty when I load up an island that doesn't have any spawning (especially seagulls).

In terms of things that will definitely make a gameplay impact, lets take a quick look at the full changelist:

Changed how the Kraken works in a few ways
- Damage to tentacles no longer matters, only hits to head
- 1 hit = enraged, 2 hits = game over
- Change a bunch of details and UI elements to fit new design
Added new turret entity and better support for destroyable objects
- Not currently used, but can be placed in Sandbox/Editor
Added new ambient animals (seagulls and turtles) with automatic placement
- Turtles spawn on the shore in groups
- Seagulls spawn on (mostly) edges of structures
- Control spawning count and beach limits in editor
Added a damage flash to parts and objects
Added Bonus Vehicles to the Vehicle select menu (old vehicles from previous missions)
Made a potential fix to logic part issues, particularly with toggle parts
- Also fixed issues with toggle parts and dropship, as seen in Mission 8
Fixed a few other minor issues

The big things to note:

The Kraken works a bit differently, with it now being a two-hits-to-die system. It moves a bit slower, the tentacles no longer matter for damage, and when it hits a structure with it's head, the structure falls down. The rage meter is replaced with a "danger level" that shows how close the Kraken is to something it can take damage from (either an explosive or large structure).

There's a new enemy turret and improvements to the entity destruction system to support it. This isn't used on any campaign missions yet, but it will be (you can place them in Sandbox mode to try them out). More turrets and other enemies will be coming soon. Now that I've got one working, the rest should be a bit easier/faster.

Bonus Vehicles resurrects a bunch of the older vehicles that were available previously. Note that this list will change in the future, so if you want any of the vehicles in particular, you may want to load-and-save them locally.

I also fixed an issue with Mission 8's vehicle (Dragonfly) that was caused by the helicopter drop. It may have also fixed the issue with toggle logic sometimes breaking, but that's a more difficult one for me to test/confirm.

UPCOMING WORK: ANOTHER SLIGHT DETOUR

Many people have asked for mouse controls over the past 1.5 years, and until recently I didn't see a good enough reason to worry about it. Controlling physics-based vehicles with a mouse is tricky, as vehicles have rotational inertia, and mouse controls are a weird kind of analog control (compared to a joystick/trigger). Plus other vehicle building games (like Besiege) don't have mouse controls.

But with the recent new campaign, the difference in controls between a gamepad and keyboard-only is more noticeable. Quite a few vehicles in the campaign, particularly those where you need to use/aim a weapon, control much better with a gamepad than keyboard. So I need to do something about that. I don't know exactly how things will work, but I'll add some kind of mouse support for controlling parts.

My initial thought is to let you assign the mouse to override four buttons (such as the arrow keys), and use an analog value for each axis that can go well past 1, but also centers itself over time. You'd have control over a couple speed values for each axis, and it'd be easy to invert the axis/speed. These values would be saved with the vehicles, and it'd be easy/quick to change. Perhaps there would be something for marking the Y-axis as auto-invert (so it could be inverted by player's options if desired).

But I'll have to try it out and see. Along with the mouse-control thing, the other major task for the next update is adding more turrets/enemies. I'll probably look more closely at adding more objective types as well. I'm anxious to get back to making/improving a bunch of missions/vehicles. There will likely be one more (significant) update before the end of the year with the enemies/mouse controls, but new missions are unlikely to arrive before early January.

For the past 6 months or so, I had been planning to redo the camera system entirely. I didn't do that, as I instead found some good ways to work around the systems limitations. The changes went about as well as I could have expected, and I consider the camera system close to final at this point, though if you have any feedback/requests, now is the time to speak up. [NOTE: Free camera will receive some more attention later] I also spent a couple days working on the new Dropship (helicopter) sequencing/etc at the start/end of Story missions in the main campaign. The Kraken got some camera focus as well, so you'll see it more clearly when it arrives, departs, or destroys everything.

Now my focus shifts towards making the game as fun as I can. Part of that is vehicle and mission design, but before I go into extreme-content-production mode, I need to get the remaining objectives and other supporting AI/obstacles working. Need things like turrets, defense drones, and other trap-like things, along with more obstacles that can be used in light puzzle-solving.

KRAKEN TWEAKS COMING?

I'm also not 100% sure about how the Kraken works right now. I'll probably try making the failure state not analog. Basically any damage to the head triggers the end of the mission, but damaging the tentacles won't matter. That will require redoing missions/timing and slowing the Kraken down, but that's not a big deal. I'm also considering having obstacles/etc that the Kraken is drawn to (like a siren), and I'll think about how else you can interact with it aside from preventing damage to it.

About 25 of the final missions will use the Kraken, and I want to be sure they don't feel like glorified escort missions. They're on the edge of that right now, and the uncertainty of the mission fail state doesn't help. With some fine-tuning, better indicators of Kraken-danger, and a dedicated "where's the Kraken?" camera toggle/button, I think the Kraken missions will be as fun as the non-Kraken missions.

0.415 CHANGES

Here's an overview of changes for 0.415, which is not complete, as I didn't write everything down this time (too many camera changes/tweaks to track):

- A helicopter now drops off your vehicle at the start/end of the main campaign Story missions
- Some controls for a few vehicles were updated/improved
- Mission intro/ending camera now use custom angles/etc (no control)
- Camera modes now cache their zoom/rotation/etc so Orbit/Follow no longer depend on each other
- Follow and Orbit camera had numerous small improvements
- Vehicles with Momentum cam now work better with Follow cam
- The Kraken gets camera-focused on at 3 different times (entry, exit, and destroy)
- Isometric camera mode was removed (Orbit does the same thing, more or less)
- Full-screen blur is used for camera transitions where appropriate
- Sped up some sequencing to remove unnecessary frames/pauses
- Tracking mode was removed (for now)
- New transition from Build mode to playing the game
- Added a new Invert Reverse Turning to Power Wheels/Treads (checkbox, enabled by default)
- Outputs and signals now use a different highlight color to make it a little more obvious that inputs and outputs are different (and signals/controls are too)
- Fixed some bugs (custom missions and a couple others I forgot)

FUTURE UPDATES

As usual, I'm not sure about frequency of future updates. At some point in the next couple months, I'll probably stop updating the game until 1.0. There will be a number of new missions before then, and 1.0 will likely double the number of missions in addition to adding some other polish/finishing features.

The big unknown is really how long it will take to make all the missions/vehicles fun and varied. Not every mission has to be amazing, but having a lot more standouts like Push It Real Good and Initial Revision is the goal.