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Abriss build to destroy5/15/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() How do you blow up a building in such a way that you hit that little target over there?įor their IGF Best Student Game-nominated title, Randwerk Games eG had a talk with Game Developer about the design details that go into making something satisfying to destroy, the challenges that come up when you're dealing with these kids of complex explosions and collapses, and the thoughts that go into making a building-creation system when you're just going to break the results in the end. ![]() And usually in such a way that you have to hit certain targets. If you expect a game in Early Access to be finished and polished and are usually one to cry and whinge about that not being so, you (a) need to grow up, and (b) should not buy Abriss yet.ABRISS - build to destroyis a game about destruction, having you build up structures only to knock them down in some spectacular fashion. Based on what it currently is, if you don't mind paying to play-test a beta-state game, I recommend you help test Abriss. The physics engine clearly needs some work. It has a lot of potential and I hope the devs follow through on it. I think it could potentially be very impressive. That feels more like an intentionally handicap that makes the game difficult to use, rather than a design choice intended to make the game challenging. I hope fixing this is a high priority.Īdditionally, you can only rotate pieces horizontally (you can't rotate a tall block to make it long or wide it always has to be tall). Specifically, it's nearly impossible to build downward without some creative intermediate scaffolding that you later remove. This actually makes it difficult to build in certain directions. The rest is frustrating, but if that's how the game is supposed to work, I can live with it.Ĭamera controls are also very restrictive you can only pan and rotate the camera horizontally (with respect to the ground, not the screen), and zoom in and out. The only gamebreaker here is solid things moving right through other solid things. Sometimes it caught on a specific stair sometimes it rolled right by. Sometimes it toppled to the side sometimes it didn't. About half the time, the thing literally fell through the "stairs." No, I don't mean it fell through the holes between the stairs (that happened too, but things are supposed to fall through holes) I mean it fell through the walls that make up the structure of the staircase. I had a build I thought should work, and it eventually did, but only after I ran it upwards of twenty times. Things fall through other things, and the same experiment doesn't always yield the same results. When I hit the first bonus level ("Stairs"), the physics engine just tears itself apart. The game feels very good at first everything seems to just work. This feels like a neat proof of concept that I want to see someone use in a more-complete game. Or after I wreck the structure, my trucks run out onto the field to salvage the materials so I can build walls and turrets. Like instead of just building contraptions to wreck buildings, I want to build contraptions that wreck buildings, leaving debris in the way of the attacking enemy forces, giving my towers more time to wipe them out. Back to the matter at hand.Īfter playing for just an hour or so, I already want to see more depth to this game. Honestly, I wish developers would pay more attention to sound quality than graphics.īut I'm getting lost in the weeds. It's a sad commentary on gamers' mentality that graphics quality is something we even discuss, let alone get pissy about. I've never found myself caring that a video game doesn't look nice enough (though I frequently care about style choices). Nothing to cheer about, but I honestly couldn't give a fruck. Things usually seem to move the way I pretty much expect them to, and I haven't yet found myself scratching my head, thinking "why the fruck did it do that?!" When it works (see below), the physics model seems to be very, very good. The idea is fun, the controls are pretty intuitive (though I would like a little better control of block-placement), and the tutorial is very good. Not a lot more, but more is more.įirst, the positive. After digging into it a little bit, there's more depth to it. I'm literally paying to test the game.Īt first blush, this is just a 3-dimensional twist on Crush the Castle (of which Angry Birds is a direct rip-off). That's to be expected, since this is Early Access. The game is fun, and I think the devs can fix it. ![]()
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