When we were in San Francisco for GDC SF 2009 recently, we met a very tall man, who knew a lot about destroying things. His name was Luke Schneider, and he is the Design Architect on Red Faction: Guerrilla - a position he's held for four years, and one which sees him dealing with all sorts of game mechanics, from aiming, movement and cover, to physics, weapons, camera shakes and (of course) destruction.

We sat down with Luke, to find out what Volition, Inc had been working on with Red Faction: Guerrilla - with a particularly destructive flavour. Why not check it out - and our on-the-spot video, while you wait for the Multiplayer Demo for the game to download on your Xbox 360 or PS3?

Download the Games On Net - Red Faction: Guerrilla Interview - GDC SF 2009

To kick things off, Luke spoke about the team effort that goes into a game like RF:G - "every team member is affected by destruction" - but at the same time, other than the physics programmer, nobody else was dedicated to developing the destruction system. "Having a physics programmer with a good design sense really helps," Luke explained. As the game has been such a long time in production, obviously things have moved and changed since the title's inception - affecting things in both good ways and bad. New hardware may have resulted in more possibilities, but budget retraints may have required scaling down some elements. Luke mentioned that Volition relied on tools and pipeline stability to help smooth the transitions between these changing expectations and the new limits on the game.

Physical Destruction isn't an easy thing to implement, with Volition having to grapple with in-game structures ending up smaller than they'd wanted, while the terrain:structure ratio was higher. They use only one world light in the game, and had to deal with "lots" of extra technical and systems design, as well as the inevitable - and unexpected - interactions and issues. The three major elements of the game - humans, vehicles and the ingame world - can (and do!) all interact with each other, as well as with themselves, which presented some new challenges. They kept going with it though - because, as Luke explained, introducing physical destruction (which is beyond effects) increases the player's physical interaction with the world dramatically.

Every physics-based element you add will work with destruction and increase the potential interactions!

Physics and destruction, at this point in the game industry's development, is really just an emergent system, in Luke's eyes. It takes a lot of effort in order to make it all flow, but it's worth it - not to mention the fact that integrating destruction and in-game physics will give you a lot more power over the game than you'd expect.

Luke paused here a moment to look at "How Destruction Works" in three popular games:

Mercenaries 2 Focus: Massive scale and explosions	Killzone 2 Focus: Detailed scale and immersion
Fracture Focus: Terrain deformation	Battlefield: Bad Company Focus: Walls and holes

As you can see, each of these games takes a completely different approach to the over-arching theme of "destruction":
Mercs 2 is big! Lots of intense, large-scale explosions - anything large that can be built can also be destroyed, without major technical limitations.
Killzone 2, on the other hand, increases the immersion and excitement of the game by pushing the limits and expanding the focus of traditional destruction systems.
Fracture has a unique focus on the changing the terrain to affect action, but also to solve puzzles.
Battlefield: Bad Company then pushes traditional destruction on a "human-sized" scale. Luke explained that this model has similar implications for gameflow and AI as they saw in Red Faction: Guerrilla.

Technology is - obviously - a big part of RF:G, with Luke claiming that it took more than two years just to get the destruction to a satisfactory level. The game uses GeoMod 2.0 technology, which combines Havok-based physics and a destruction system built on top to hold the structures togeter. This adds up to thousands of objects that each has thousands of pieces, and means there are lots of filters and "tricks" to get it all to work in realtime.


One of the major things the developers were concerned about early on was the "soft-crash" problem they saw in the original Red Faction - where a player would dig a hole into the world and then run out of ammo, meaning they were stuck at the bottom. Fortunately, thanks to the differently implemented destruction in RF:G, this is a significantly reduced problem, but it can still occur when debris or junk blocks your path. The solution to this is that the player now always has a weapon which can break up debris, or push it out of the way, easily.

...and this, of course, is the sledgehammer. The sledgehammer evolved largely as the answer to the soft crash - but Luke explained that the developers also wanted the game to have an iconic weapon. They'd tried other options (including a sonic shotgun which boasted unlimited ammo), but none of them were quite satisfying enough.

The sledgehammer also highlighted another development change in the game. Originally, for the first two years of the project, RF:G was created with a first-person perspective. This had its flaws, particularly in a world full of flying debris. If something exploded behind you and sent a chunk of concrete into your skull, looking through a first-person perspective would mean that your character would simply collapse and die, for "no apparent reason". Moving the camera back to a third-person, however, means that even if you don't get enough time to duck, you'll be able to see the debris flying at you, and you'll know that that is what killed you.

The change also meant that the sledgehammer worked more effectively visually, reduced the need for high shard granularity and also meant that the player feels much more like the character is part of the ingame world.



...wait, what is this "destruction granularity" anyway? Put simply, in RF:G, the destruction ranges from little things like breaking a wall with a sledgehammer, all the way up to major things like smashing through structures and causing massive buildings to collapse. This means the possibility space for destroying a building is pretty enormous - and that's before you look at the interactions that can occur because of it. "Everything can interact with everything," Luke stated, while mentioning that all of these effects are dynamic, there's nothing scripted about it.

Luke explained that one of the major problems thanks to the destruction is the fact that sometimes, debris will block your path. For a gamer, that's not so much of a drama, you'll be able to find another way around, or break out the slegehammer and smack it into submission. But when you look at the AI, or the NPCs, the developers had a bit of a job on their hands to prevent them from "freaking out". Because of this, Luke explained that the NPCs do not intentionally destroy things often.
(Exception to the rule: Tanks and some turrets will fire at the player behind a wall.)
(Exception to the exception: Unless it's an important wall.)

It's also important to note that there are no less than six different types of destruction (melee, explosive, large explosive, physical, vehicles, stress), which can have an effect on more than five different material types (wood, steel, concrete, carbon composite). Luke elaborated - weapons were understood as being "extreme explosives", while vehicles were a "combination of mass, weapons and explosive in a protective shell". When demonstrating that "stress is stressful", and that large buildings with few supports will collapse, Luke laughed and explained that you could set up quite a deadly little impact by filling a vehicle with explosives and then driving that into a building... "Don't stand under bridges," he advised.

If you're not a fan of destroying everything, perhaps you'd like the additional feature that Volition implemented - reconstruction, which adds another unique element to the game - the ability to rebuild bridges or undo the careful destruction work your colleague has just achieved.


Luke comments that the team soon learned that if you allow the player to "run & gun", they'll do just that - however, if you slowly 'force' the players to use new tactics using a smooth difficulty ramp, they'll start to learn alternate ways of achieving things. (Most people, when they first load up RF:G will still explode everything, we hear.) There will still be people who, no matter how familiar they are with the sledgehammer, will still run around a wall rather than exploding it, and there are those who will become fixated on one particular tactic and continue blindly with it, regardless of failure or other options - but for the most part, gamers can learn new techniques. "Some players get excited, others try to test what's destroyable, some just absorb and move on," he says. There's often no belief without experience - having someone say "everything's destroyable" doesn't mean much - and isn't necessarily something you'll try - until you see it happen for yourself.

Some dot-point observations:

Destruction with physics is an awesome emergent system Getting crushed by debris Dissolving floor beneath an enemy Dropping a bridge onto the enemy to crush them Knocking a vehicle into a building Fighting across islands with catwalks Building a bridge with a smokestack

To recap, Luke reiterated that "Destruction is expensive", and a design feature which will affect every single person working on that team. While it's pretty nifty, it's not enough by itself, so it's important to build very solid supporting systems, and design elements of the game to work with both physics and destruction. From what we saw of RF:G both at GDC and afterward, and the feedback we've been hearing about the singleplayer demo, it sounds like Volition might have gotten that balance right.

Download the Red Faction: Guerrilla "Tools of Destruction" Trailer #6

The playable multiplayer console demo is out now, and we've received word that the full game will be available a little earlier than expected (on Xbox 360 and PS3, at least), with the release date confirmed for June 4th. PC gamers will have a slightly longer wait on their hands, but THQ promise that you're not forgotten.

Want to know more about Red Faction: Guerrilla in the anxious leadup to launch? Why not take a wander through our File Library and see if anything there grabs you - in addition to screenshots, there's a pile of videos that are well worth checking out. And (as always) keep checking back here at Games On Net to be regularly updated about what's going on with destruction on the red planet!