This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they’ve taken to make their games. This time, Teardown.
Games about destruction tend not to do the whole destruction thing very well. Put it this way: for years Red Faction has been the banner for destruction in games, despite its most recent instalment releasing nine years ago and its core being rather more about shooting than destruction. While you can destroy lots of things in Red Faction, there’s not much of a game in it.
Thankfully, we now have a new banner destruction game: Teardown, a game in which you can destroy pretty much everything. But Teardown’s serendipitous and difficult journey from tech tinkering to release taught lead developer Dennis Gustafsson something important about the whole idea of letting players demolish stuff. “There’s this expectation that more destruction in games is always a good thing. But actually, it’s really, really hard to design something around a fully destructible world.” (more…)