I'm excited to announce that Instruments of Destruction will be featured in the PAX Rising Showcase at PAX West! See all the PAX Rising titles here: PAX Rising Showcase.

PAX West is one of the biggest gaming conventions in the US, and it takes place at the beginning of September in Seattle (Labor Day Weekend here in the US). The PAX Rising Showcase chooses a small number of indie games every year. Being selected means you get a small booth in a great location on the show floor. I've been to PAX West a couple times to show Overload with Revival Productions, but this will be my first Radiangames title I've shown. It will also be the first time I've met Auvic (musician for Instruments, Speed Demons, and Rhythm Storm) in person, as he'll be coming as well.

Part of what helped get Instruments selected is this trailer I put together at the end of May. It shows off a number of the vehicles that will be in the new singleplayer campaign. Many of those shown will debut at PAX West along with new maps/structures/missions/etc.

[previewyoutube=ammEnWOyCFE;full][/previewyoutube]

MAKING PROGRESS

That leads me to what I've been working on lately, which is mostly a lot of random stuff. The most exciting (and buggiest) is optimizing the destruction system. It used to take up to 100 milliseconds to un-parent all the blocks from the structures during big explosions. That step is now skipped completely, so destruction is a lot smoother. Parenting (and un-parenting) objects in Unity is *really* slow, and I realized I didn't need to un-parent blocks when they break off a structure because the physics happens independently regardless.

The bugs mostly come about because setting the position/rotation does care about parenting, and that still needs to happen at certain times (such as creating the buildings), and recycled blocks in particular can have issues. I believe I have most of the issues fixed, but it's a difficult problem to solve with certainty. Weird stuff has always happened on occasion in Instruments due to all the physics (and some rare lingering bugs), so it's hard to track down the root cause, especially with thousands of blocks in every scene.

Other recent changes include removing the entire XP system, more work on the multi-vehicle system (still not done), making a bunch of new more-realistic structures, fixing water effects appearing beneath terrain, and improving how structures and large blocks react to explosions.

I'm hoping to reach a good stable point soon where I can update the Steam version to 0.300 (and fix anything that breaks) before really focusing on the PAX West demo. I have a list of 10-12 vehicles that will be featured there, and that includes many of the ones seen in the video above. That build will come to Steam shortly after PAX West.

FEATURED VEHICLES HIATUS

Due to a lack of interest (less than 10 vehicles entered in the Grappling Hook contest) and a desire to focus on PAX West and version 1.0, I'm going to pause the Featured Vehicles contests. I will set 4 of the entries to be featured (and update the featured vehicle text) later today. Thanks to those that entered, and to all the past featured vehicle creators. I'll consider bringing back the Featured Vehicles again in 2024.

Overall interest in the game is low at the moment, and that's partly intentional on my part. I've avoided promoting the game in the first half of 2023, aside from entering it in a few things like PAX Rising/etc. With the new campaign and version 1.0 coming, there will be a lot more stuff happening and the game will receive more promotion as well.

So look for version 0.300 in the next couple weeks, then for the PAX West demo in early September. Beyond that, the full campaign and version 1.0 will be focus. I expect to debut the campaign before 1.0, but I don't have a realistic timetable for either one quite yet. I previously said Late Summer 2023 for campaign, but Fall 2023 is now the current goal and I don't want to promise anything until it's a lot closer to being done.