Instruments of Destruction News

The recent focus for Instruments of Destruction development has been on the new singleplayer campaign and the PAX West demo in particular. When I started to work on the missions for the demo, I started to write voice lines for the intros and endings to each mission, and I was not happy. The writing was fine, but it felt like it wasn't a particularly interesting theme (testing experimental vehicles) nor was there a strong purpose to you destroying everything on these small islands.

I went back to brainstorming ideas for the overall theme/story of the campaign. There were a couple ideas about having the buildings being "infected" with some sort of mutated plants or locust-like pest that you were trying to eradicate, or the buildings being powered by some over-ambitious and out-of-control geothermal technology that would trigger earthquakes/volcanos/etc if the buildings weren't destroyed ASAP. But none of those ideas seemed as simple or visually obvious as the Blast Corps plot: In that game, there's a nuclear weapons disposal truck that's automated, malfunctioning, and heading straight towards its destination, regardless of what's in the way. [Blast Corps is a classic Nintendo 64 game created by Rare in the late 90s.]

That plot is a bit to explain, but once you're in game, it's simple: Don't let the big red truck hit buildings or it all goes boom. Given that Instruments of Destruction takes place on islands, a slow-moving exploding truck wouldn't work, but a giant monster from the sea might work. The problem was I didn't think I could make a Godzilla-like beast that looked good, animated nicely, and could traverse a variety of terrain well. But after I realized a giant octopus might work, I tried prototyping it over the next couple days as a big sphere with lots of ropes attached. Everything went pretty smoothly, and within a week I had the Kraken in the game.


The exact mechanics of how the Kraken might change a little, but it currently works like this: The Kraken wants to destroy all the large structures on the islands. As it does so, it takes damage. That damage makes it Rage meter go up, and if the meter fills to the top, it'll do a big smash attack that destroys everything, and will make the island sink. The islands don't *actually* sink at the moment, but I'll be working on that this afternoon.

So you're basically trying to clear the way for the Kraken so it doesn't take damage. You can't kill the Kraken, you can only make it mad, so attacking it is a good way to end a mission quickly. On the bright side, the blast wave looks really nice. There's a lot of work still to do with the Kraken and the UI/story/etc around it, but it was working well enough for the PAX Demo.

A Report On PAX West 2023

So I got the Kraken working less than a week before PAX, and was furiously putting together some missions and refining stuff as much as possible up until PAX started. PAX runs for 4 days, and I spent a lot of time each night refining the UI/game/missions/etc based on how things went. We had 3 stations playing the game, and there were frequently small crowds of people waiting to play, especially on Saturday and the busier parts of Friday and Sunday.

Not everything went smoothly, and there was a bug with destruction getting harder over time that meant I had to restart the game every 30 minutes or so. I thought fixed the bug Friday evening, but it was actually one of 2 bugs that were having a similar effect. The bigger part I couldn't figure out at PAX, though I fixed it earlier today. I ended up treating PAX as a super-intense playtest, as well as a deadline that I could use for gaining some momentum on the singleplayer campaign. In those regards it was a very successful event.

In terms of value, I'd say spending $5,000+ (got the booth for free, but plane tickets, rooms, equipment, and other stuff add up) is not the most cost-efficient way to get playtesting, but it was quite time-efficient. The game got over 2,000 wishlists from PAX, and sales were also up last week, though that definitely had more to do with the game being on sale than PAX. The wishlists alone mean the cost was probably worth it, and the game is definitely heading in a better direction because of PAX.

PAX Demo Playable Now (in a separate branch)

Since Monday's PAX demo build (0.350e), I fixed the annoying destruction bug (I think), replaced the 3rd missions' vehicle with a more-fun variation, and tweaked various vehicle controls. I also made it play better with keyboard, though it's still a gamepad-focused demo. The build is now available in a separate branch on Steam (the one labeled 'pax demo'). It uses a separate save file.

The PAX Demo build doesn't show everything that will be in the main campaign, but it's an indication of the direction the campaign will take. It's also definitely not final. The closest to "final" you'll see in the demo are the first 2 missions (the first mission is likely to have the island/vehicle refined slightly). Every other mission will be revised and likely changed where it appears in the campaign.

Some stuff NOT in the demo: Each island will have a STORY or TRAINING mission with a 3-STAR scoring system, and a BONUS mission with a score/time/place-based system (no bonus missions in the demo). For all mission types, you are given a pre-built vehicle designed for that mission, and that vehicle is unlocked by beating the mission (every Story/Training mission vehicle is unique, but may also appear in a bonus mission). Getting 3-stars lets you use any vehicle on that mission.

Vehicle building (and Sandbox mode) will always be in the game, but the campaign will not focus on it, and it's not in the demo. There will be *something* that teaches the player how to use the vehicle building system, though I'm not yet sure if that'll be its own smaller campaign or a bunch of optional missions in the main campaign. As mentioned previously the vehicle building UI will be undergoing a complete revision (with gamepad support added). I'll definitely be playtesting the vehicle building system at some point to help refine it, but it'll be a few months at least.

So that's about it for now. The campaign will remain the focus for a while, and after I get the PAX demo integrated in to the main branch (and the camera system redone), the number of missions will be expanded pretty quickly. There will likely be an update to the PAX Demo soon to add the "island sinking" part of the Kraken game over sequence, but beyond that it will probably be a couple weeks 'til the integration update.

Just a quicker bit of news this time. Version 0.301 is the final update until after PAX (unless I really broke something). Let's start with the changelist, and I'll review some of them a bit more detail below.

VERSION 0.301 CHANGELIST

• Added ammo counts and overheating advanced options to weapons
  
• Added ammo/sec and overheating to laser (+ laser S)
  
• Added structure damage multiplier to individually-placed structures (damage from player)
  
• Added structure damage multiplier to maps (damage from player)
  
• Added player damage multiplier to maps (all damage)
  
• Fixed a big issue with structure collapses, and adjusted collapse settings a bit
  
• Made big player impacts do more damage to structures, apply some extra velocity to them
  
• Changed automobile entities to use white paint instead of yellow
  
• Added more towers and tall buildings
  
• Added some smokestacks and storage silos
  
• Added some more low buildings and warehouses
  
• Added some utility posts and fences
  

Weapons, including lasers, can now use overheat settings and ammo counts. These are the intended ways to limit weapons, if they need to be limited for missions. You can use both on one weapon, and you'll see little sliders/etc on the HUD. The HUD elements may change later, but they work for now (other feedback elements may be enhanced as well).

Structure damage multipliers can be edited on a per-map basis and on individually-placed structures, and these are specifically designed to modify damage from vehicles. Damage TO player vehicles (from everything) can also be edited on a per-map basis. All these are intended for tuning missions/difficulty/etc for the SP campaign.

FALLING DOWN
One of the bigger bugs that's been present for a while is the following:

This didn't happen too often, and I couldn't figure out why it was happening more frequently on certain structures, so I tweaked settings for the past year or so with no success. It seemed kinda better sometimes, but some of the newer structures had the issue more frequently than others.

Mazapine from the discord server targeted this building as a problem in particular, and after a couple hours of debugging, I found the issue: Structures that were highly-interconnected (lots of links between blocks) would sometimes fail to collect the layers of the structure during the collapse algorithm. So instead of this structure showing it had 21 or so layers, it'd stop after 3 because it couldn't find the 4th layer blocks from the 3rd.

I fixed that issue, and found a 2nd issue while testing it. The 2nd issue caused some other random blocks to take damage during the collapse when they were already disconnected. Between those two fixes, and a tweak to damage from big player impacts, the destruction feels better than before.

The final thing from this patch are a bunch of new structures. These will be used in the new missions for PAX/etc.

PAX PRIORITY

Speaking of PAX, I'll be making some big changes to the game for PAX this week, so that means no more patches. The game will be changing quite a bit, and most of the menu will be inaccessible. If you have any changes/fixes that are needed, you'll either need to let me know today (Monday the 21st) or wait a few weeks 'til I'm able to get the PAX changes cleaned up and ready for launch on Steam in September. I've got a lot of things to work on before PAX, so I apologize if I don't get back to you in the next couple weeks.

Version 0.299 is now live on the "debug" branch for Instruments of Destruction. This update brings a large number of changes under the hood, particularly regarding vehicles. After 2-3 days of testing/fixes/etc, I expect to update the main branch with version 0.300.

This latest update took a while for a few reasons, some of which I've discussed before, but the main one in terms of actual work on Instruments: There were more systems that needed to change for multi-vehicle support than I initially realized. Throughout the entire development of Instruments (up until late May), I've always assumed there would be 1 custom-built vehicle at a time. That assumption meant lots of systems could behave globally, which is generally easier to deal with than having multiple copies of something that can start/change/stop/etc.

The code base in Instruments is pretty massive at this point for a solo project, so I have a hard time remembering how everything works, or why I made some specific code/logic choices that I did years ago. I changed lots of code across many files, and it wasn't always clear how to best transition to the new not-global systems. Either way, I think I have all the major problems solved and I've done quite a bit of testing, so hopefully it'll be able to make the leap out of the debug branch before the end of this week.

VERSION 0.299 CHANGELIST

It's not just vehicle-related changes in this update. There are also new structures, a big speed-up for destruction, and the removal of the XP system.

• Changed lots of systems to allow multiple vehicles at once
  
• Vehicles: Place start points in map editor to allow more than 1 vehicle
  
• Vehicles: Select from vehicle starts in build mode in top left
  
• Vehicles: Player 1: Always uses keyboard, uses 1st gamepad by default (unless disabled in options)
  
• Vehicles: Player 2: Always controlled by gamepad (1st or 2nd used, depending on options)
  
• Vehicles: NONE: Can be taken over by nearby players by pressing [V] on keyboard or [Y] on gamepad
  
• Sped up large explosions, collapses, deactivating accumulator, etc
  
• Created a large number of new more-realistic structures to replace previous ones (more to come soon)
  
• Improved explosion damage vs. large blocks
  
• Tweaked some camera controls, particularly when using the gamepad
  
• Removed XP system
  
• Removed build mode requirements/goals (they are deleted from a map if they exist)
  
• Editor: Added some new selection buttons for structures
  
• Editor: Added new vehicle start entity, which replaced the rock entity
  
• Changed grass visuals a bit to have better scale
  
• Fixed most water particles that appeared under the terrain
  

MULTI-VEHICLE DETAILS

If you want to place/spawn more than 1 vehicle in a map, the MAP has to have more than 1 start point. Only a few built-in maps have more than 1 currently, but I'll add more later. Each start point will spawn a vehicle if one is assigned.

There are 4 Vehicle Control methods: Player 1, Player 2, None, and AI. Player 1 uses the keyboard and/or the 1st used gamepad. If you change the option "PLAYER 1 - USE GAMEPAD" to be disabled, Player 1 will only use the keyboard. In that case, Player 2 will use the 1st gamepad, rather than the 2nd. If you have a 2nd player, the camera controls will not be shown, with the 2nd player controls shown in the upper right instead.

Vehicles with NONE can be taken over by either player. Get close to the vehicle in question and press [V] on the keyboard, or [Y]/[triangle] on the gamepad to swap vehicles. Vehicles marked AI currently do nothing, but will eventually be controlled by AI, and can't be swapped to either way.

While editing in Build Mode, you'll see a list of start points/vehicles in the upper left. The current one (that you can edit) is highlighted, and you can switch between them at any time. If you want to see them in the level without playing, just hit the "Show All Vehicles" checkbox. It shows where they'll all start in the world. Note that vehicles now try to start on the ground, rather than falling from the sky. Or at least they start where the vehicle start points are. You can change the Y/Z start offsets for a vehicle by editing the cab in advanced mode.


If you use the Island/Map Editor to place start points, the relevant things to edit are on the right side. By default, vehicle starts are set to "NONE" for the vehicle to spawn. You can set the Showcase vehicle to spawn instead.

When editing multiple vehicles, the various vehicles you've edited/loaded will be saved until you close the game. Restarting the game will load the *last* vehicle you edited, regardless of the starting vehicle slot it was in. The other vehicles are not saved, so make sure to manually save them if necessary.

OTHER STUFF
Build mode requirements and the XP system are both gone from the game, and neither is coming back. In an upcoming update, the Star system will receive some significant revisions. The destruction system got a significant speed up in certain cases (particularly large-scale destruction), and you should see a lot fewer water effects from impacts beneath the ground. There are some new structures that have a more realistic sense of scale, and I'll be creating a lot more new ones to use in the campaign. They generally use fewer blocks than previous structures, relative to their size.

That's all for now. Definitely let me know if you find any issues with the new build (reminder: Debug branch only for now), and I'll try to fix them ASAP.

I'm excited to announce that Instruments of Destruction will be featured in the PAX Rising Showcase at PAX West! See all the PAX Rising titles here: PAX Rising Showcase.

PAX West is one of the biggest gaming conventions in the US, and it takes place at the beginning of September in Seattle (Labor Day Weekend here in the US). The PAX Rising Showcase chooses a small number of indie games every year. Being selected means you get a small booth in a great location on the show floor. I've been to PAX West a couple times to show Overload with Revival Productions, but this will be my first Radiangames title I've shown. It will also be the first time I've met Auvic (musician for Instruments, Speed Demons, and Rhythm Storm) in person, as he'll be coming as well.

Part of what helped get Instruments selected is this trailer I put together at the end of May. It shows off a number of the vehicles that will be in the new singleplayer campaign. Many of those shown will debut at PAX West along with new maps/structures/missions/etc.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

MAKING PROGRESS

That leads me to what I've been working on lately, which is mostly a lot of random stuff. The most exciting (and buggiest) is optimizing the destruction system. It used to take up to 100 milliseconds to un-parent all the blocks from the structures during big explosions. That step is now skipped completely, so destruction is a lot smoother. Parenting (and un-parenting) objects in Unity is *really* slow, and I realized I didn't need to un-parent blocks when they break off a structure because the physics happens independently regardless.

The bugs mostly come about because setting the position/rotation does care about parenting, and that still needs to happen at certain times (such as creating the buildings), and recycled blocks in particular can have issues. I believe I have most of the issues fixed, but it's a difficult problem to solve with certainty. Weird stuff has always happened on occasion in Instruments due to all the physics (and some rare lingering bugs), so it's hard to track down the root cause, especially with thousands of blocks in every scene.

Other recent changes include removing the entire XP system, more work on the multi-vehicle system (still not done), making a bunch of new more-realistic structures, fixing water effects appearing beneath terrain, and improving how structures and large blocks react to explosions.

I'm hoping to reach a good stable point soon where I can update the Steam version to 0.300 (and fix anything that breaks) before really focusing on the PAX West demo. I have a list of 10-12 vehicles that will be featured there, and that includes many of the ones seen in the video above. That build will come to Steam shortly after PAX West.

FEATURED VEHICLES HIATUS

Due to a lack of interest (less than 10 vehicles entered in the Grappling Hook contest) and a desire to focus on PAX West and version 1.0, I'm going to pause the Featured Vehicles contests. I will set 4 of the entries to be featured (and update the featured vehicle text) later today. Thanks to those that entered, and to all the past featured vehicle creators. I'll consider bringing back the Featured Vehicles again in 2024.

Overall interest in the game is low at the moment, and that's partly intentional on my part. I've avoided promoting the game in the first half of 2023, aside from entering it in a few things like PAX Rising/etc. With the new campaign and version 1.0 coming, there will be a lot more stuff happening and the game will receive more promotion as well.

So look for version 0.300 in the next couple weeks, then for the PAX West demo in early September. Beyond that, the full campaign and version 1.0 will be focus. I expect to debut the campaign before 1.0, but I don't have a realistic timetable for either one quite yet. I previously said Late Summer 2023 for campaign, but Fall 2023 is now the current goal and I don't want to promise anything until it's a lot closer to being done.

I started working on Instruments of Destruction in January of 2020, which means it's now been 3.5 years of development time. But not all of that time has been spent on Instruments. Of the 42 months since the game started, I'd estimate I've worked on the game between 30-34 months total. I've also worked on updates for Speed Demons (Apple Arcade-only until 2024), created + finished Devastator for PC/consoles, and created the Rhythm Storm demos.

After version 0.261 of Instruments in early June, I spent a little time taking some elements of Rhythm Storm to create a new "skeleton project". A skeleton project means a mostly empty project with some basic code for drawing stuff to the screen, playing sounds, getting input, etc. That took a bit over a day to trim it all down and clean it up a bit. Its purpose was to both allow me to have a basic project to start with in the 2023 GMTK Game Jam, and to have something to work from for future mini-projects.

"FUTURE PROJECTS"

The future ended up being the next day, and what I planned to be a 2-3 day "arcade" project turned into a 3 week game that I'll reveal in the future (it's done aside from sound effects needing work). In retrospect I should have finished it in 2 weeks, but I spent too much time waffling between various art styles/variations. Between that arcade project and a couple family vacations, I only worked on Instruments for a day or two more in June.

WRECKLESS

This past weekend was the GMTK Game Jam, and I spent about 38 of the 48 hour event working on a prototype. The theme for the jam was "roles reversed", and after coming up with 10 or so possible ideas, I went with one that felt the most obvious based on my experience: Creating a physics-driving game where you direct the traffic, but can't control your own car. You can read more about the game on the itch.io page. Here's a screenshot:



Wreckless is a fun toy/game, and I can check off "Do a Game Jam" from my bucketlist (I don't have one, but it would have been on there if I did). I'm glad it's over though, and I don't have any desire to keep working on Wreckless or do more game jams anytime soon.

A CLEAR PATH AHEAD

One thing I've realized while working on these various projects: I don't mind jumping between smaller projects, but I don't like having large not-quite-finished projects lingering in the background. I knew the GMTK Game Jam would be a turning point in my focus, and I'm glad the desire is there already: I want to finish Instruments of Destruction. I previously planned to have Rhythm Storm in the October Steam Next Fest, but now I'm less sure. If I really need a break from working on Instruments, it might happen, but I'm also fine pushing everything else off until Instruments is done.

Nothing has changed regarding what I'll be working on: A new/larger/improved single player campaign with dozens of pre-built fun vehicles to use, and redoing build-mode's UI. First up on the agenda is finishing up the work to support multiple vehicles at once (for real), and figuring out the best way to use vehicles built in the game for AI purposes (as both enemies and allies). There's a lot of work to do, but those are the two hardest remaining tasks by far, and I want to take them down now while my resolve is high.

I'm not sure how long everything will take or how frequent updates will be from here on out. But rest assured that getting Instruments of Destruction version 1.0 done ASAP (and done well, of course) is my primary objective.