Summary
- Development history and what to expect from the highly-destructible sandbox.
- Developed by Red Faction: Guerrilla’s lead technical designer Luke Schneider.
- How fan feedback helped shaped gameplay design.
It’s been a pretty long journey to get here, but today, Instruments of Destruction is launching on Xbox Series X|S.
I’ve been working as a solo developer for over 15 years now, and this has been by far my most ambitious game to date. Most of my games have been smaller, more arcade-style titles like Fireball 2 (which launched on Xbox Series X|S earlier this year) that are designed for short bursts, but Instruments of Destruction has a whole lot more that I’ve added across five years of development.
In the game’s story, you’re a new hire at Sharpe Industries as a vehicle test pilot, tasked with taking the titular instruments of destruction out to see how much havoc they can wreak across various scenarios. There are over 50 Campaign missions with various objectives – destroy everything within a time limit, avoid damaging specific structures, and so on – each with additional challenges once you’ve finished the level. As well as that, there’s a 25 mission Build & Destroy campaign which introduces you to the mechanics of building your own vehicles. To top it all off, there’s a Sandbox mode where you can build whatever you want and take it out on any unlock level to see what wonderful creations you can come up with. There’s a lot to do!
I started work on Instruments of Destruction in 2020 with a simple goal in mind – I wanted to make a game about destruction. I had previously worked as the lead technical designer on Red Faction: Guerrilla, and while I’d worked closely with a team of programmers to make sure the destruction in that game looked and felt incredible, I hadn’t actually coded any of it myself. With this as my twentieth game, I wanted to push my own skills and see what I could come up with.
I spent a long time fine-tuning the physics and destruction model into something that looked impressive and played nicely with everything else on the screen. Building your own vehicles was also key to the game, and this was a ton of hard work, making sure all the joints worked correctly and vehicles didn’t collapse as soon as you tried to drive them.
But as I got further into development, it became clear that it wasn’t very beginner-friendly. I’d added all these granular tools for building vehicles and making them blow stuff up, and somehow, it felt like the game wasn’t reaching its true potential. So, I regrouped and considered what Instruments of Destruction is actually about – vehicles, physics, and destruction. How could I remove the barrier to entry so players could experience all of those elements within moments of booting up?
Looking around at other games, I saw people talking fondly about Blast Corps, a game I’d missed when it first came out. After taking a weekend to play through and understand what made it so beloved, I had the answer to my problem – a fully-featured campaign with pre-built vehicles, where you can jump in and get straight to the destruction. It took years of designing and fine-tuning to get the campaign levels just right, but in the end, it was worth it.
Instruments of Destruction wouldn’t have made it this far without the dedicated community of builders and destruction lovers who gave me their feedback throughout its development, from the early beta days through Early Access and all the way to launching in 1.0. And now with the support of publisher Secret Mode, I can bring it to an entirely new audience on consoles, complete with all the game modes and mechanics you’d get from the PC version.
I learned a lot making Instruments of Destruction, and I’ll be taking all those lessons into my next games, which will continue to be focused around pushing my skills in creating even better destruction mechanics. Thank you to everyone who helped me get the game this far and thank you to everyone who checks it out on Xbox Series X|S. I can’t wait to see what new vehicles people make!
Instruments of Destruction
Secret Mode
$19.99
Join Sharpe Industries as a vehicle test pilot and journey across the world to remote outposts where everything needs to be destroyed, using purpose-built wrecking machines such as flying bulldozers, tanks wielding quad rocket launchers, and ornithopters with grappling hooks.
Master these contraptions and demolish every structure in sight across two campaigns and a Sandbox mode. Deconstruct buildings piece-by-piece or take advantage of explosive chain-reactions with Instruments of Destruction’s advanced physics system.
Tackle a carnage-filled campaign filled with demolition-based objectives, then test your skills even further in dedicated high-score challenges that apply new parameters and objectives to each level. Or take a break from missions and unwind in the Sandbox mode to raze the world at your own pace.
And don’t just destroy: build. Learn how to design your own machines in a dedicated epilogue campaign for the ultimate demolition experience. Use the in-built editor to construct devastating vehicles armed with chainsaws, lasers, claws, wrecking balls, magnets, vortex generators, and much more.