Let's get the important stuff out of the way first, then I'll ramble on about the game's history, evolution, and what's left to do.
Instruments of Destruction version 1.0 is releasing on May 10th, 2024 (aka 37 days from now). Version 1.0 will include a main campaign with around 50 missions and a separate high-score challenge for each mission. In that campaign, which is designed to be enjoyed by players of all ages, there's no vehicle building required. The secondary campaign, which focuses on teaching the vehicle building mode and more puzzle-style objectives, will have around 25 missions (and 25 challenges). Plus, Sandbox mode will always be there for your mayhem needs.
Other big additions include professional voice acting for the main 2 characters in the game (see below for more details), full text localization into 12 languages, a few new graphical features, and more optimizations. And of course there will be a large number of bug fixes and other minor improvements to vehicle building and some vehicle parts.
We've also got a new trailer announcing the release date. Check it out here:
Before going over the remaining work, let's rewind and see how the game evolved over the course of development:
A Four Year Journey
It's been over 2 years since Instruments of Destruction released into Early Access, and 3 years since the game was announced. I started working on it in January of 2020. It wasn't called Instruments of Destruction at the time, but instead "Debris Inc" The short description for the initial concept doc that I wrote up at the time:
Debris Inc is a physics-heavy destruction-based game. Take down a series of increasingly complicated and interesting structures using a variety of unique vehicles. At the same time, try to avoid doing too much damage to the surrounding structures.
The full doc is only a page long, and a few details are off, but for the most part the description matches how Instruments of Destruction has turned out. The big omission is that there's no vehicle building mode mentioned, as constructing your own machine wouldn't be added until a few months later. The game underwent a number of direction shifts early on, but ended up back where it started, with the addition of vehicle building. There's also less of a focus on "avoiding damaging surrounding structures", though that is an objective in quite a few missions.
The game released into Early Access in March of 2022, and at the time the most comparable game was definitely Besiege (but with modern vehicles and more detailed destruction). However, when I released the game's original Early Access Release Date trailer in February of 2022, another game was mentioned even more often than Besiege: Rare's classic N64 game, Blast Corps. I knew all about Besiege, but had very little knowledge about Blast Corps, other than vaguely being aware of its existence. We'll come back to Blast Corps in a bit, as I wouldn't really pay attention to that for a while.
Over the next year or so in EA, most of my focus was on adding to the vehicle building experience, which meant adding more parts and more powerful editing capabilities, but very little in the way of making the vehicle building more user-friendly. There were some new missions added, and a lot of cool new physics toys and ways to make crazy vehicles, but I really didn't have a cohesive plan for how to finish the game.
I made multiple roadmaps, including plans for a combat-focused campaign with roguelike elements, but I didn't really feel good about where the game was going. It had lots of potential, but I wasn't sure what to do with it. In early 2023, I finally played Blast Corps through Xbox GamePass. Even though it looked dated to my eyes (I'm not a fan of blurry textures), it was also very clear to me: Blast Corps was more fun to play than Instruments of Destruction.
It wasn't really the moment-to-moment gameplay or missions itself that stood out, but the simplicity and flow of the whole experience. It felt rewarding and things moved quickly between missions. There was a variety of vehicles and objectives, and missions were quick and fun. I needed to bring that flow and experience to Instruments, and let the standout elements of the game shine through. For Instruments that means the campaign should focus on vehicles, destruction, and physics.
Fast forward 6 months and the game was featured at the PAX Rising Showcase in Seattle. The new campaign with pre-built vehicles was pretty rough, but things went well. Lines were long, players were returning to play multiple times, and I heard the word "satisfying" a lot. I felt like I finally had a path to finishing the game.
There were some other things to take care of, including redoing the build mode UI to support gamepads and adding a bit more atmosphere to the game, but I finally felt like I could imagine what the final game would look like. And it is remarkably like the original description, though with a lot more "vehicle variety" than I imagined.
The Finish Line Approaches
As of April 3rd, there are 41 playable missions in the main campaign across 9 regions. There are 2 more regions left to finish, and I expect those to go relatively quickly. The secondary campaign will be the focus after that. But those missions are far easier to make than the main campaign's, as they don't require a vehicle, and many will be based on previously-created missions. After the missions are playable, completing the story and writing dialog is the priority. Everything right now is focused on getting what needs to be done so that voice recording can be completed.
We're working with a voice director for the two main story characters: Hendrix (formerly Jenkins) and Mr. Sharpe. We received over 100 auditions for Mr. Sharpe, and over 200 for Hendrix (yes, that was way more than expected). I listened to all the auditions last night, and it was a bit overwhelming to narrow down the field. Final selections will be completed this week, but recording won't happen for a couple weeks at least.
Alan has completed all the technical work for making localization updates a lot easier, along with getting in a number of optimizations and adding support for some graphical features (such as game-resolution scaling). There's one more important optimization to make, but after that he'll be helping clear out the bug backlog and adding quality-of-life features.
Many of the challenges (and vehicles for those) still need to be completed as well, but they are lower priority due to the bottleneck with voice recording. Some of those challenge vehicles will be variants, while some will be unique.
As we've added more missions, we've gotten feedback from playtests that players *want* to use the same vehicles more often. We're not doing that exactly, but we are standardizing the control schemes a bit more, and doing more vehicle variants than originally intended. So the "Roller" (names are subject to change) from mission 2 is seen at least 3 more times in various forms, for instance, and the Shover from mission 4 has at least 2 variants.
My goal has been to have a hugely varied and interesting line-up of vehicles, and we're still hitting that mark. I can't think of any game that has more unique usable vehicles (counting built-in but not user-created ones), but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I think the one area where the final lineup is a bit lacking is in the walker category. Making good walking mechanisms that can move moderately quickly and not look janky is very difficult (without animating them in a separate program). I hope to add more walkers in challenges, but my engineering skills seem to reach their limits when I've tried to make them so far.
As you can see, there's still a lot left to do, but the most difficult parts are behind us. I apologize that we've not been responding to feedback or questions lately. Our focus is squarely on getting 1.0 finished. Even if we don't respond, we are doing our best to keep track of all the bugs and suggestions.
If you're wondering if you should buy the game now or wait for 1.0: I'd recommend wishlisting it now, and buying it when 1.0 is released. The game will get a 15% discount on release, and buying it on release day will result in a far more satisfactory experience. You can buy it now if you want to see the beginning of the game, but keep in mind progress in the campaign will be reset for version 1.0.
Thanks again for the patience and support! The finish line is just over the horizon.