"Red Faction: Guerrilla" Q & A

One of the perks of this gig is that I get to talk to the people who are never really heard from who make the great games that we love to play. You don't know much about or hear from the people who are too busy making the lighting effects of that awesomely overpowered rifle, or the intricate art design of the pottery that we as the players are too busy breaking to get to the next boss!

This time, I have the pleasure of asking Eric Arnold, Senior Developer at Volition, a few questions of what makes his hit game, pun intended, "Red Faction: Guerrilla" for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 so much fun to play.

GameCore: For me, the satisfaction of swinging the hammer into an EDF soldier, and pretty much anything else, is fantastic. How was your team able to make so much destructible stuff in the game? Most games have to build a world that is stable, where yours had to be able to be destroyed at any given time.

Eric Arnold: Our goal from the beginning was always to make the entire world destroyable. We wanted to hand the player a box of tools, point them in the right direction, and then stand back and watch the crazy solutions they would come up with to overcome the challenges given to them. Letting them quietly break a hole in the back of a building or flatten it to the ground at any time opened up the players' choices in a way I've never seen before in any game. Beyond giving the player freedom, the destruction system also simultaneously made them feel powerful and vulnerable at the same time. Powerful when they jump in one of the construction walkers and tear through a two story building, and vulnerable when they take out the supports of the same building with a sledge hammer and get caught in the collapse.

Integrating it was no easy task. Artists had to become structural engineers to prevent their creations from crumbling as soon as they are dropped in game. Programmers had to deal with the increased simulation load caused by updating the physics in real time, as well as increased rendering load from having to draw the insides of walls that no other game would ever show. We also had to deal with problems like entire buildings not existing because the player already blew it up. In short there is a very good reason it took 5+ years to bring this world to life.

GameCore: I noticed that I could hit the same building (I think) the same way during the destruction mini missions. Yet many times I would get a different result of how the wall would start to tear apart. How was your team able to make that happen?

Eric: That is the core of the destruction engine. It absolutely does react to exactly where you hit the building, and beyond that how you hit it. Swinging a sledge hammer will have a different effect than hitting it with a rocket propelled grenade or driving through it at high speed with a hijacked dump truck. Our engine is constantly tracking what the player is doing and reacts appropriately. Driving out on to a bridge after the supports have been weakened will cause the bridge to collapse in to the valley below. And none of it is scripted, the player can chose how and where to do damage at any time. It may be to their advantage to leave the bridge intact so they have a quick getaway route after a mission, or they could set a trap and blow it on the way out to dispose of any chasing enemy.

GameCore: What was your favorite part of RFG to build as a developer and destroy as a player/tester? What was a memorable demolition from your team?

Eric: I was pretty much exclusively on the destruction system the entire time, so of course it is my favorite part of the game. Early on in the development one of the artists built a five story office building that was made out of mainly concrete. For some reason it was more fun to destroy than anything else at the time and it did a good job of putting my code through its paces, so it was my main test bed for a good year or two. I spent long days blowing it up, twiddling some settings, resetting, and blowing it up again. It was a sad day when the building didn't load anymore because the data format changed.

GameCore: I know it's not part of the destruction engine, but how did your team get the swinging and impact of the hammer as it hit anything to feel to right? It's a guilty pleasure to sprint up to an EDF soldier and lay into him with that sledge hammer! BAM, SUCKA!!

Eric: Haha, yeah, pretty much the first thing everyone does is walk up to the first human they see and smack them in the face with a well placed blow from the sledgehammer. Credit for the sweet (and guilty) feeling goes to our animators, designers, and countless hours of busting innocent virtual humans in the head here. Our team was very passionate about getting the feel right, so getting a feature to the point where it worked was really just the start. From there it took tons of iteration time to get it just right.

GameCore: I noticed that the textures seams are a little more noticeable on the PS3 version than the Xbox360. Any technical reason for that?

Eric: Nothing significant, just minor differences in hardware really. There was a rule in place that if something will only benefit one platform we won't do it. We didn't want a lead platform and a port platform so once we got the PS3 version up and running the rest of the development was done in lock step. I'm very proud that they are nearly identical given the differences in the underlying hardware.

GameCore: Was creating the system for 2 platforms a challenge for your team? Which one required less heavy lifting, so to speak?

Eric: Adding more platforms to a game definitely introduces new challenges. For starters we had the Xbox 360 development kits for a couple years before the PS3 ones were released. That meant that everything we did was custom fitted for the 360. Well, then along comes the PS3 and we find out that it did not like the way we were doing certain things and we had to come up with interesting ways to use the specialized SPU processors to squeeze the performance we needed out of the system. Thankfully we have some wicked smart guys here and we pulled it off, but I would not have been sad if we got an exclusive contract with one of the manufacturers.

GameCore: How was your team able to model building destruction? You guys watch a lot of demolition movies or did you let the computers model all the havok wrought in simulations?

Eric: We definitely relied heavily on real world reference to get the demolition to look and feel right. At one point there was a hotel in town that was scheduled to be brought down, so a couple of us packed in a car and camped out for a good part of the afternoon to take it in. We brought along cameras and sound equipment to bring details back with us, and paid special attention to how materials interact when they break apart. Again iteration played a large part in the results you see in the final game. Things like adding rebar to concrete were added later in development to make it look more realistic. Little touches like that may not seem overly important, but without those details the world is not as believable, and it was only though each team member going above and beyond to recognize and implement features like rebar that we were able to create a rich, breathing world to explore and interact with.

GameCore: Why do you think it is so much fun for people to destroy and demolish things when it takes so long to build them in the 1st place?

Eric: I have spent a good deal of time thinking about that lately. If you give a group of small children a sand box they will carefully build a castle then gleefully laugh as they knock over their newly built fort, then do it all again. It is just inherently fun break things, and the bigger the thing is the more fun it is to break. It can be a stress relief or just give a feeling of power and control. We worked extremely hard to create a virtual sand box for the player to create and destroy as they see fit, we just hope it gives them the same pure joy they had as a small child kicking over a tower of blocks.

GameCore: Thanks again for your time and great answers Eric!
And look forward to GameCore"s review of "Red Faction: Guerrilla" coming soon!
Produced by Alejandro K. Brown