Designing For Destruction - Red Faction
Justin F. | Friday, August 28, 2009 at 12:10AM 
On Tuesday July 2, 2009, the very day that Sony announced the PSP Go and Nintendo showed off a brand new Metroid game at E3, THQ quietly released Red Faction: Guerrilla. As the hype from E3 came and went, RF:G enjoyed critical success from media outlets, with some hailing it as the best title of the summer. What makes Red Faction: Guerilla different from its third-person shooter brothers is not a shiny coat of graphical wow-factor, nor is it any sort of revolutionary advancement in video game narrative. Instead, RF:G developer Volition went a different route, crafting an object destruction system that made full use of the horsepower under the hood of modern game consoles. When players took their trusty sledgehammer to a building, the stone and mortar broke off, crumbled, and shattered in an amazing display of virtual engineering. This was full-scale dynamic ruination, the power to level towers to their foundations hiding right beneath the push of a button.
What powered this open-ended world of collapsing edifices? Five years of work creating one of the most unique and impressive game engines seen in quite some time. Digital Kuroko delved further and asked Red Faction: Guerrilla Design Director James Hague to shed some light on just how difficult it was to create such an intricate gameplay environment.
Digital Kuroko: First off, why did you decide to come back to the Red Faction franchise for another game?
James Hague: We always wanted to do another Red Faction game, but as part of that we knew we needed to go beyond the original Geo-Mod 1.0 destruction system. We had to wait for more powerful hardware to come along.
Digital Kuroko: Seeing a building come apart into rubble for the second or third time got me thinking about the absolute insanity happening on the CPU and GPU while a structure comes down; how did you guys manage to squeeze so many objects on screen, objects that have influences on them like gravity and the ability to damage other objects while falling, and keep the frame rate so stable?
James: Well, there’s a reason RF:G was in development for five years! In the original tech demos we put together in 2004, the frame rate was in the single digits. We went around and around iterating the technology and the techniques for creating buildings. It took a whole series of breakthroughs before we had things running fast enough to be able to build the world.
Digital Kuroko: Can you speak about what it was like to build the environments, taking into account the fact that buildings have layered materials (i.e., stone built around rebar)? How much longer did it take to build a structure with stuff inside of walls and floors?
James: In most games you build movie sets. You know there’s nothing behind that wall, or that the floor layout would make no sense at all in an actual building. The hardest part of building real structures was throwing out all that old knowledge. You can’t build anything that doesn’t make sense. You’ve got to account for wall thickness and weight and so on.
Digital Kuroko: In other interviews you’ve said that Red Faction Guerrilla has been in development since 2004, but that what players experience now was really only created in the final 18 months of development time; what was that moment where you finally said “okay, this is it, what we’ve created here will work”?
James: Destruction was always fun from the start, even back in 2004, but of course that’s just some raw tech, not a game. It wasn’t until two years later that the core design for the game—with EDF control of sectors and destruction targets and morale and all of that—came together. It was another two years before we had real sectors of Mars to liberate.
Digital Kuroko: What was play-testing the game like, especially when things didn’t blow up or fall apart like expected? Was it hard, or even possible, to go back to the drawing board with such complex objects and variables at work?
James: Destruction issues—in terms of how buildings could be damaged—rarely came up in playtests. What was unexpected was that players weren’t used to being able to destroy the world in an arbitrary way. Some people would run a really long way out and around a building instead of just hammering through the wall.
Digital Kuroko: How much structural engineering knowledge did everyone go into making this game with, and how much did you guys come out with?
James: We started without any, except for having one artist with architectural experience, and I’m sure real engineers would say we ended up without any, too. What we had to learn was to have some common sense. If you’ve got a building with fifty tons of concrete that’s supported by a couple of small metal girders, well, that’s not going to work. You don’t normally think about that when making games. We had to start thinking about buildings as actual buildings and not fantasy structures.
Digital Kuroko: Where did the idea for the nano rifle come from? Was it around from the beginning or at some point did someone say “you know, we need to be able to flatten that hangar with a gun!”?
James: It was originally put in as a nod to the nanotechnology weapons in Red Faction II, and was on one the very early weapon lists for RF:G. I think it was a Nano Pistol, at first. It ended up being so cool that much of the story was woven around the Nano Rifle.
Digital Kuroko: Some of the demolition missions were really creative. In particular, the one where you have to attach mines to explosive barrels and then roll them down a tube to destroy a building at the bottom of a hill sticks out for me. How were these challenges conceptualized? Was it a case of having something really cool happen in-game during development and then deciding to purposely set it up as a mission?
James: Demolitions Masters were designed to show players what was possible with destruction, to get them to think creatively. Some of the Demo Masters were based on things we always did ourselves, like putting charges on hydrogen tanks, and we wanted to teach people how to do that. Others just came out of thinking up crazy scenarios that wouldn’t be possible in other games. To give credit where credit is due, John Epp came up with most of them, and Andres Gonzalez designed with one you give as an example.
Digital Kuroko: All the audio in this game, especially the gun sound effects, has a healthy punch to it. The voice acting is also great. Was sound one of the focal points during development?
James: Sound is a huge part of any game, so yes, it was a focal point. In terms of voice acting, we spent a LOT of time auditioning people and we even recorded some voice parts multiple times with different actors, just because they didn’t quite ring true the first time.
Digital Kuroko: How has the reception to the game been so far for you guys? Are you seeing people share the same awe about the destruction that I’m sure you felt when you saw it in action the first time during development?
James: It’s definitely one of those games you’ve got to play to try. It’s fun seeing people put it down with “been there, done that,” and then watch opinions completely turn around once they’ve actually played it.
Digital Kuroko: Before the game came out, you had said that it would completely change the way a player thinks about a game without destruction; I, for one, have found this to be true. Going forward, do you think Volition will use the level of destructability found in Red Faction in other games? Do you see what you’ve accomplished as a sort of mandate for the future?
James: I think quite a few people thought I was just saying some kind of marketing BS, but I honestly meant it. During development I had to stop playing most shooters, because it drove me nuts that I had this giant rocket launcher, and yet I couldn’t even use it to knock a door off its hinges. Will other games reach this level of destructibility? I don’t know. Personally, I expect worlds to be more interactive and so I’d love to see RF:G’s destruction inspire other designers. But it’s not something you can just tack on. You have to be thinking about it right from the start.
James Hague, Red Faction, destruction in Interviews
Reader Comments (23)
Red Faction: Guerrilla is a third-person, action shooter video game published by THQ. This game is the third title in the Red Faction series.
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