UPCOMING: The Destruction Update!

Hi, operators! I got sidetracked again. Here's a long boring devlog about what's coming in the next update, coming sooner than you would think:

Boring anecdote below. Skip past this section to see the new destruction system.

My first introduction to mech games as a youngun was, oddly, MechAssault 2: Lone Wolf (unless you count a demo for A.M.O.K. that came free with PC Gamer). It never makes it onto lists of The Fourteen Best Retro Games (You'll Love #5's Referral Links For Cheap Fibreglass Insulation), but it's got bundles of charm, nice weighty arcade combat, and some really nifty tech for handling building destruction.

Similar to the approach of classic Xbox 7/10 Mercenaries, once a building took enough damage it would play a big impressive particle effect, sink rapidly into the ground and leave a pile of rubble behind. MechAssault 2 also had a nice graphical trick where if you bumped into a building it'd swap out part of the texture for a damaged version, with the sound of glass smashing. It doesn't sound like much, but it really helped to build the impression of your mech as something big and heavy and significant, making you feel like you were piloting something quite dangerous.

When I was writing the building destruction system for OVRLRD a few years ago (I took five minutes here to try not to freak out about how long I've been doing this), I took these games as inspiration and wrote a really weird system. When you damage a building, it creates a low-resolution texture and splats a black pixel onto it. Then it maps that texture onto its surface and only draws parts of the building which haven't been splatted. This means you can hit buildings with weapons and cut visible holes in them. I also filled every building with a weird mess of scaffolding so they didn't look obviously empty.

This system sucks. It uses loads of video memory, barely looks good and, unforgivably, creates fake holes to see through that you can't shot through, and which NPCs can't see through.

I can't remember what happened three weeks ago but I entered some sort of fugue state and decided to replace this system entirely, so that I can have more built-up urban areas in the game. The new system is being playtested now (thanks Discord!) and looks like this:

Inspired by squinting for hours at old videos of Red Faction: Guerilla, buildings now have real internal structures that are physically simulated in real time. If you damage the outer shell enough, it will break apart and reveal the internals, which can also be broken apart.

Weapons, wildfires and physical impacts will all inflict damage on both the outer shell and the inner structure, destabilising it. Parts of buildings can be blown away, burned through or smashed into, creating holes. You can look (and shoot) through these holes, and so can NPCs.

Buildings can stay standing for a while if you're careful about how you dismantle them, but if you knock out enough supports they'll topple over or implode, collapsing into rubble. A building is still physicalised while it's collapsing, so it can collapse into other buildings and cause a chain reaction.

Since you're a mech, you can also just plough into a building at full speed, looney tunes-style, and leave a gaping hole behind:

Gameplay-wise, I'm still figuring out exactly how damage should work, and whether a building collapsing on a mech should damage it or not. Sound off in the comments if you have opinions on this.

As with everything in OVRLRD, I'll continually work to improve performance on this, but it's pretty good already. When the update drops, you should be able to go ham without melting your PC too much.

If you're in the discord and have access to the preview test channel, you can try this system out right now! I've added a basic urban area to Zaliznyy to stress-test this system (look inland for the tall buildings) and will try to incorporate more built-up environments to the island as development continues. For the time being, there will be a new 'CONTRACTS' campaign where I can dump one-off sandbox environments. Select 'demolition' to stomp around a big clear map with lots of buildings and no enemies.

More footage, with audio:

Why did you do this?

I don't know. The style of mech game OVRLRD is has certain vital qualities. To me, two of the crucial elements to get right are scale and mass. You need to have a sense of how big and how heavy the machine is, otherwise you might as well be playing a regular shooter with a novelty HUD.

Big buildings should behave differently to small buildings - they should react slower, and once they start moving they should seem very hard to stop. This makes them feel big and heavy, and the fact that you can bring them down or plow right through them in turn makes you feel big and heavy.

Regardless, some things just feel right. If a mech can't destroy a building by running through it at full speed then what the hell are we even doing here man

I also personally think it's a shame that so few games have satisfying destruction physics, with visuals seeming to take more of a priority these days. Be the change you wish to see in the world etc. etc.

When's it dropping? Why would you show it to me if I can't have it?

Soon! Optimising this has been what you might call a 'total nightmare' so it's been a bigger task than expected, but there's very little left to do before it's game-ready. Weeks, not months. I'll make another news post announcing it when it arrives.

Aren't you meant to be working on the campaign?

Look, do you want to smash through a building or not

Okay, fine, What are you working on next?

Once this update is out I'm planning to go on a content spree. Ideally I'd like to make a lot of improvements to career mode, since that's what I get the most feedback on and it seems to be what people want the most.

Can AI speed this process up? Wait. Stop. Is that a gu-

Okay, time to get back to work! And jobhunting. Sales of OVRLRD have ticked up a little which has helped even things out a bit, but the project's not out of the woods yet.

If you know someone who's looking for a Unity developer then feel free to get in touch! You can reach me running around with the other solo devs on bluesky, or get in touch via the OVRLRD discord!

That's all, operators. Have fun, and see you soon!

-nige