Teardown dev’s top priority is always physics; the game can come later

Teardown is more than just your average heist game. While this may not be apparent at first, as soon as you look closer at this sandbox title, it’s clear that the physics, use of voxels (which are essentially 3D pixels), and attention to detail here are second to none. After a day at Tuxedo Labs, TRG got the low down on everything Teardown has to offer in the way of DLC content and why physics is so important to the small team.

Teardown stands out from the crowd thanks to the beautiful and practical use of voxels. The first idea for this seemingly simple game came from when the now-CTO of Tuxedo Labs, Dennis Gustafsson, started experimenting with ray-tracing and physics-based destruction.  

“It really started just as a technology experiment with voxels”, Gustafsson says. “But we didn’t know what to do with it. For the longest time, our project was just a voxel destruction sandbox”. There were several prototypes, and the team even gave up at one point, but luckily, they persevered, and after some more experimentation, the concept for Teardown emerged.  

Smoking hot

According to Gustafsson, Tuxedo Labs prides itself on a “tech first” mentality. “We first experiment with something that’s fun to play with and come up with the game afterwards." Voxels happened to be the perfect vector for this. They not only make specific calculations more accessible but also mean that the devs can focus on perfecting and experimenting with all sorts of physics-based features.

One such feature is the incredible smoke physics found in Teardown. If you’ve ever unwittingly started a fire as a byproduct of your destructive tendencies, then you’ve probably come across a fair amount of smoke, and become quite adept with fire extinguishers. What you may not have noticed while you were knee-deep in all the flames and chaos is that it turns out that smoke and fire extinguishers both have incredibly complicated physics. And this is replicated faithfully in Teardown.

For example, if you fill one of the buildings with smoke and then break a small hole in the wall, all the smoke will filter out of the room in the same way as it would in reality. The fire extinguisher powder also interacts with its surroundings realistically in the game. “Very complex physical calculations are carried out on the smoke and extinguisher to see that it collides realistically with the environment and behaves a lot like it should”, Gustafsson says. “However, this doesn’t really have much of an impact on the in-game experience.” 

“The smoke and particle physics is something I've been interested in for a long time as a hobby”, Gustafsson admitted. “So it's probably way more advanced than it would have needed to be made just because I like it that way”. 

The vehicle and driving physics also go the extra mile. While Teardown is undoubtedly not a driving game, thanks to its authentic physics, every vehicle you drive handles as if it were real, meaning you can have a thrilling time driving trucks or cranes around each map, destroying everything in your path, feeling as if you were actually in real-life control of said vehicle. While this isn’t necessary for players to enjoy Teardown's heist and destructive elements, it’s still worth it, in the dev’s opinion. 

Teardown is and continues to be a passion project. The team at Tuxedo Labs will always go above and beyond to make sure that the player base has the best experience with the sandbox destructive heist game possible. Whether that’s making sure the smoke filters itself as if you had actually set a warehouse on fire or perfecting the hues of grass to show where patches have died thanks to footpath erosion. If you’re a fan of intricate details and realistic physics, then this is a game that’s made for you.  

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