How Unreal Engine 5's Chaos physics was modified for this indie game about tearing down your hometown with a sledgehammer

Valencia-based indie game developer Deconstructeam has been around for almost 15 years and is known for its narrative games presented with 2D pixel art. But according to its founder and creative director, Jordi de Paco, the studio has always wanted to make "real" games, albeit jokingly, which brings us to its first commercial 3D game, Virtue and a Sledgehammer.

That desire to expand from 2D to 3D isn't uncommon, as with the developers of Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault, but instead of expanding the team, Deconstructeam partnered with Selkie Harbour, a two-person studio with 3D expertise. But before they even started making their sledgehammer-based narrative game, they also had time to experiment together, which has already been part of the studio's process between projects.

"Oftentimes if you get too experimental the result is that you fail, so we tried to accelerate that process by making many small things to eventually find out what's next," De Paco explains. "We took that same approach with 3D games, just making small games and releasing them for free on itch.io, so we could just fail freely. The most important part of developing a successful creative endeavour is developing a context that allows you to fail. So we created that space so we could fail several times and find what's interesting for ourselves to do in 3D."

From those projects, including the short interactive essay Many Nights a Whisper, which is free to download on Steam, the two studios arrived at Virtue and a Sledgehammer, which has the player character returning to their hometown where "you are so angry, the only way through is just smashing everything" with a sledgehammer.

Although Unreal 5 has Chaos physics that allows for destructible physics, creating the destructible gameplay in Virtue and a Sledgehammer, which allows you to take your sledgehammer to any building or even the android inhabitants, required heavily modifying how its physics work.

"The logical system is totally different because the model is using a Voronoi noise on top of a mesh," Selkie Harbour's Guillermo Ferrando explains. "You have a static mesh, and you can subdivide it. When you start, you see a building that hasn't been broken; you see the static mesh is a proxy, but the moment you break it, it detects what's the closest Voronoi chunk that you've hit, generates a sphere around it, and then it breaks around that space in that moment. Instead of drawing a single mesh, you're drawing as many chunks as that mesh is subdivided into."

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That kind of complexity can affect shadows and dynamic lighting, throttling the GPU, though fortunately there was an easy way to handle it. "The moment you break something, if you are playing in low or medium graphics, we kill the shadows," says Ferrando. "It's not noticeable when you play it unless you look at it, but otherwise the Steam Deck wouldn't be able to run it."

Even as a 3D game, Deconstructeam's 2D roots are still present in other ways. Take the dramatic framing of its cutscenes, which De Paco admits was directly influenced by indie narrative game 1000xResist's cutscenes, but even more so by comic books.

"To me, it's like an illustration, and I need to have in my mind where the text is going to come up and where the characters are," he explains. "It would have been way easier just to have subtitles, but to lay out the exact point, like graphic design for a magazine, for every shot was really worth it because it really draws you into where we want you to be looking at with the text."

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Meanwhile, the lo-fi 3D aesthetic gives off a PS2 vibe, the console that first gave us Red Faction and is also famous for its destructible-environment gameplay. However, De Paco says it neither specifically emulates lower-poly PS2 graphics nor is it a performance choice in Unreal Engine 5.

"It's a result so that our audience from previous titles who were expecting a pixel art style that has been Deconstructeam's signature style until now can still connect with this 3D game," he explains. "We actually work with pixel art concept art, and we develop mockups for how this would look if it was one of our 2D games. Then we think about how we can port this into a 3D space."

Ferrando adds: "It's also faster to develop the pixel art models as we can get away with just displaying the shadows because the fidelity is not super high. So it makes the whole development easier, even though that's not the main reason we chose this aesthetic."

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Despite the low-poly textures, the environments still had distinct details, from the architecture to small appliances, that made it clear this hometown was set in a mountain forest area on Spain's east coast rather than, say, the Pacific Northwest.

"We try to be really Spanish and convey our culture," De Paco concludes. "In cinema or other works, we are used to seeing other cultures, but for some reason with video games, we worry about making things more palatable to bigger audiences. So we need to try to actively change and be able to have different settings and cultures in our games."

Virtue and a Sledgehammer is releasing on PC on 24 October, and a free demo is available to download on Steam.

Alan Wen is a freelance journalist writing about video games in the form of features, interview, previews, reviews and op-eds. Work has appeared in print including Edge, Official Playstation Magazine, GamesMaster, Games TM, Wireframe, Stuff, and online including Kotaku UK, TechRadar, FANDOM, Rock Paper Shotgun, Digital Spy, The Guardian, and The Telegraph.