Teardown (video game)

Teardown is a sandbox game with puzzle and action elements.[1] The player can freely navigate the game's five open-world levels, which are made entirely of destructible voxels.[1][2] They are given one or more objectives—such as destroying or stealing certain objects, or razing a building—of which some are required and others optional.[1][3] In the first part of the game, there are twenty missions with different sets of objectives.[2][4] Any structure can be destroyed using a given set of tools, including a sledgehammer, bombs, and a shotgun, while others can be erected using planks.[3][5] Further tools are unlocked during the gameplay,[1][5] while already acquired tools can be upgraded using cash earned from collecting valuables scattered throughout levels.[6] A spray can helps to mark routes or points of interest, while a fire extinguisher can put out fires.[7][8] Ridable vehicles—such as trucks, cranes, excavators, and boats—are placed within levels and can also be destroyed.[1][5] Explosives, such as propane tanks, are found in some levels.[8] The ultimate aim is for the player to create an efficient path that would let them complete the objectives as quickly as possible.[5]

The initial setup has no time limit.[5] Once an alarm is triggered by stealing a first item or starting a fire, a 60-second timer begins.[1][3] Within this timeframe, the player needs to complete all required objectives and reach the getaway vehicle.[3][5] Failing to do so results in a helicopter spotting the getaway vehicle and the player losing.[1][3][9] Missions can be restarted or previous progress loaded from a quick save.[1] Some levels replace the timer with an escape sequence in which the player is chased by a weaponised helicopter.[4] Through accessibility options, the player can adjust the game's difficulty, such as by increasing the time they have to complete a level after triggering the timer.[10][11] In a separate "sandbox" mode, the player can experiment with the unlocked levels without an objective.[1] Custom levels and structures can be modelled using the program MagicaVoxel and imported into the game.[12] Teardown includes a level editor and integration with the Steam Workshop.[13][14] Enemy robots, smoke particles, and other elements are scriptable for custom content with the Lua programming language.[15][16]

Teardown's story is primarily told through emails that the player character receives. The game takes place in the fictional Löckelle Municipality and the player controls the unnamed owner of Löckelle Teardown Services, which is facing financial hardships due to a lack of clients.[lower-alpha 1] In desperation, they accept a suspicious job from Gordon Woo, who requests an old building to be destroyed during the night to make way for the construction of his Evertides Mall. The morning thereafter, Tracy, the owner's mother and Löckelle Teardown Services' head of sales, alerts the owner that the building had been under cultural heritage protection and that a traffic camera had caught the company vehicle entering the site. While she persuaded the officer in charge, Löckelle Police Department criminal investigator Parisa Terdiman, not to pursue an investigation, Terdiman in return asks for help investigating Lawrence Lee Junior and his company, Lee Chemicals. Under Terdiman's guidance, the owner repeatedly breaks into the Lee Chemicals premises and Lee's private properties at West Point Marina to retrieve information about a mystery client.

In the meantime, Woo makes further requests to Löckelle Teardown Services, including the stealing of classic cars from Lee, who, in retaliation, orders the company to sink several of Woo's cars. The alteration between them escalates and Woo eventually orders Löckelle Teardown Services to destroy the power generator at Lee Chemicals with a bomb he provides. Unintentionally, the resulting blast also destroys the nearby dam and floods the area. By this point, Terdiman has discovered that Lee Chemicals' client was BlueTide, an energy drink producer run by Mr Amanatides. As no official records exist on Amanatides, Terdiman asks the owner to break into the BlueTide premises on Hollowrock Island and retrieve communication data by hacking into satellite dishes. She then hears of the flooding at Lee Chemicals and additionally requests the retrieval of accounting data from that company.

Having heard of Löckelle Teardown Services from Woo, Amanatides contacts the company because he requires better security for BlueTide. RoboSec, a producer of autonomous guard robots, offered him a discount in exchange for information on its competitor, Quilez Security. Amanatides thus requests Löckelle Teardown Services to break into the location of Quilez Security and take photographs the in-development robots. Thereafter, Terdiman states that she found that BlueTide's drinks contain an unknown, highly addictive substance and she requires clean samples thereof to be retrieved from the Hollowrock Island facilities. A leftover shipping label leads Terdiman to uncover that the Evertides Mall is also controlled by Amanatides and is being used as a repackaging hub for the unknown substance. The owner recovers the shipping logs from the Evertides Mall, which reveal the distant Muratori Islands as the intermediate shipping target. Terdiman sends the owner there and instructs them to steal several barrels of the substance as evidence and then destroy the local supply chain before returning to Löckelle.

As a result of the disruptions on Hollowrock Island, at the Evertides Mall, and on the Muratori Islands, Amanatides fires Woo as the mall's manager and begins a revenge plot against who he believes disrupted BlueTide's businesses. Under his orders, the owner retrieves a truck and steals autonomous robots and nitroglycerin from Quilez Security. While Terdiman and the Löckelle Police Department raid Hollowrock Island and apprehend Amanatides, he reveals to the owner that the machine that he built from the retrieved components, the Truxterminator, is being deployed. He found the former Löckelle Teardown Services company vehicle in Tracy's driveway in Cullington and thus intends to destroy the town using the machine. Tracy is unaware of her fate as she is trying out her new tanning bed, so the owner arrives in Cullington and safely guides the Truxterminator through the town and into the sea.

Teardown was developed by Tuxedo Labs, an indie game studio founded by Swedish programmer Dennis Gustafsson.[17][18] Gustafsson had previously been involved with companies developing middleware for game physics.[4] Together with Henrik Johansson, he had founded the mobile game studio Mediocre in 2010, where they worked on games like Smash Hit, PinOut, and the Sprinkle series.[19][20][21] After shutting down Mediocre in 2017, Gustafsson began working on technology for destructible environments using voxels, an idea he had been looking to pursue for some time.[19] Voxels appeared easier to implement because regular polygons would have led to arbitrary geometry with overly complex collision detection.[4] Inspired by MagicaVoxel, he implemented the voxel technology alongside real-time ray tracing, which the simplicity of voxel-based scenes made possible.[4] Gustafsson subsequently created a proprietary game engine that integrated both aspects.[19] Both the engine and custom tools are written in C++.[21] In the engine, voxels were implemented using an 8-bit colour pallette, where each material determines voxel's colour, roughness, emissiveness, reflectivity, and physical material type.[22] Levels were designed with MagicaVoxel.[21] Gustafsson did not add material stress to the engine, feeling as though predictable behaviour would be more beneficial to the player.[19]

After creating a voxel sandbox, he worked alongside former Mediocre designer Emil Bengtsson to create game concepts that made use of the technology.[4][19] Like with Smash Hit and Sprinkle, Gustafsson wanted to model the gameplay around the technology, this time using destruction as a key element.[9] Several ideas were floated, starting with a driving game in which the player would drive into and topple objects. This concept appeared unfavourable because the destruction was merely used as an effect rather than as part of the gameplay. Several stealth game prototypes followed over the span of several months, but Gustafsson and Bengtsson were unable to construct stealth gameplay where the enemies were insensitive to the sound of the player's destruction.[4][20] One survival game prototype that was explored featured giant spiders, but Gustafsson and Bengtsson were generally not content with the use of enemies, as they would disrupt the destructive gameplay.[4][23] Lastly, Gustafsson and Bengtsson toyed with a heist concept, requiring the player to steal a predefined set of objects. The task in that concept was considered too trivial, while limited tools and use of caches were found too restrictive.[4] Seven months into the development, after the two could not come to a mutually liked gameplay variant, Bengtsson left the project in early 2019.[4][19] Gustafsson further experimented with the technology on his own, refusing to drop the work he had already done.[4][19] He stated that it was difficult to find a justification for the possible destruction in the game without resorting to a shooter game or violent gameplay in general.[19] He considered the design process his most frustrating yet.[9]

Gustafsson shared the progress of his technology via Twitter from 2018 onwards.[24][25] Early commented gameplay was later released by Bluedrake42 on YouTube.[18][26] In August 2019, Gustafsson announced that he would be creating a game from the technology.[18][26] He came up with the two-phase heist structure, which he said was "compatible with all the limitations (or lack thereof)" of a fully destructible environment, while "offering an interesting challenge".[9][27] As a result of the destructibility, obstacles within levels could only be designed with elevation, distance, water and unbreakable objects, though Gustafsson intended to use as few unbreakable parts as possible, limiting them mostly to the levels' lower bounds. He also avoided overly large maps, initially due to a technical restriction and later because he felt like it would have made navigating them tedious.[9] Within the second phase of the structure, Gustafsson weighed several methods to impose a time restriction—such as setting the level in a cave that is slowly flooded—and eventually settled on a simple timer.[4][9] The initial levels Gustafsson designed for this concept were long, straight corridors that the player would have travelled down to obtain an item, then go back the same route to reach the getaway vehicle. After Bengtsson re-joined the project, the two discovered that the game played much better when it featured multiple objectives in a non-linear open world, which became the final design.[4] A popular request was to have the helicopter not spot the getaway vehicle when time runs out and instead chase after the player. Gustafsson disliked this idea, saying that it "would introduce an element of randomness that would discourage the strategic thinking and careful planning".[9] For the quick save system, he used run-length encoding to compress world data at high speeds, seeking to encourage the system's use by eliminating long load times.[28]

The game was revealed as Teardown on 1 October 2019.[29] The announcement was coupled with the release of a walkthrough video, a website, and a preparatory Steam storefront entry.[30][31][32] Later development updates by Gustafsson documented dynamic weather, further vehicles and levels, and other content being added.[33][34] Teardown's music and sound design was composed by Douglas Holmquist, who had worked on many of Mediocre's games, starting in November 2019 before joining the project full-time in February 2020.[35] For each of the seven materials processed by the game engine (wood, metal, glass, plastic, masonry, foliage, and dirt), Holmquist created impact and break sounds in three sizes and with multiple variations of each size. He also created looping squeak sounds for metal and wooden joints. Foley for each material were recorded in conjunction with Mathias Schlegel, a sound engineer and friend of Holmquist. Further sounds by Holmquist were made for a shotgun (using a Benelli M4), a handgun (with a Colt M1911), vehicles, and ambience. During the development, unused sounds he had created for Smash Hit were recycled as placeholders.[35] The soundtrack for the game was created using a Minimoog Model D, Fender Jaguar, Fender Deluxe Reverb, Fender Jazz Bass, Gibson Hummingbird, Neumann TLM-103, Neumann KM-184, Shure SM57, Shure BETA57A, Korg SV-2, Way Huge Pork Loin, Rogers 70's drum kit, and Logic Pro X. It was performed by Holmquist with Andreas Baw on the drums, Hans Kristian Durán providing vocals for the song "Löckelle", and Håkan Åkesson mastering the songs at Nutid Studio. The soundtrack was released via Bandcamp; Part 1 on 1 December 2020 and Part 2 on 29 December 2021.[36][37]

Teardown was revealed anew in a trailer shown during Gamescom: Opening Night Live in August 2020.[24] The game was planned to be released as an early access title for Microsoft Windows later in 2020.[38][39] In October 2020, Gustafsson formalised this release date to be 29 October 2020, and made the game available as scheduled.[40][41] The early access phase was to last approximately one year, subject to change depending on player feedback.[42] The initial release included one half of the game, Part 1, with the second in development by January 2021.[4] Part 2, released on 2 December 2021, added further missions and tools, as well as enemy robots.[43][44] The update was given the version 0.9, with Tuxedo Labs commenting that it would from then on prepare the game for its full release.[44] The game was released on 21 April 2022.[45] The announcing trailer published earlier that month compiled the updates made during the early access phase.[46]

• Official website