destructible buildings and new citizens idea

[late gust]

Probably would be told no but

Suicide bomb makers/letter bombers/building demolition

Basically people who would use either war crime gas(mustard gas) in a small building to kill there target being a murder idea

Or someone who would just blow an entire room up, able to hear it half the city away,

Stopping one of these or catching these types will get you 3x the karma points

Also, it could be, just an idea of that sort...so if you don't act fast enough, they go boom, so your unable to redeem the karma.

So two murders, or both people be turned into pasta sauce so you can't id them or get anything info wise

[pallid frost]

Not sure if destructible buildings really fits the games direction

[late gust]

Trying to edit thos

[pallid frost]

All good edit away!

[late gust]

I'm trying to edit but it's not saving

[pallid frost]

Oh weird. I'll check back in later after you manage to edit then!

[late gust]

Mostly just, can blow chunks out of the building and have them slowly rebuild, Mabye take a long nap of a few hours and have a new lay out

[pallid frost]

I mean, I still don't see how it fits the vision / direction of the game.

[warm crow]

Why not?

If slowly the buildings can be reconstructed, would be pretty cool to have some destructive crimes

Though i believe major barrier would be implementing the same

Teardown Collab

[willow delta]

I could see minor instances of explosives/demolition.

• It could be used for murder, destroying objects and evidence near the incident. (Still want to allow ID of victim though; this ain't Umineko.)
• It could be used for access for crime: murder, theft, etc. Someone could make a hole in a wall to access a locked room (leaving behind the hole for a week) or to open a safe (bank safe, which would be more than code?).
• Or for sabotage, say destroying one or more of the machines in factory buildings, which seem harder to investigate than most spaces at the moment.

But yeah, I can't see major instances, like whole floors or buildings, happening regularly. Maybe a building as a "finale case", assuming there was some clues to follow. (https://discord.com/channels/561162895887695883/1116483410135892039) Likely a factory building, so the result to the larger system is a "mass unemployment" rather than a "mass murder/eviction", though the latter would be interesting.

May want to limit to just NPCs/incidents. Not sure how to give this to a player to use, otherwise.

[pallid frost]

Engineering-wise, runtime environmental destruction is VERY intensive and would most likely involve a complete ground up rebuild of the entire building / prefab system that the game currently uses for laying out rooms. Keep in mind, there are a ton of systems interacting with level geo as well such as navmeshes (or other types of graphs), apartment furnishing and item placement, that would have to be rebaked runtime to account for destructible environments.

Mechanically, destructible environments are cool but they probably would not bring this specific game closer to it's core vision or themes. The core loop of the game revolves around creating emergent narratives through procedurally generated cases. I don't see how a destructible environment would further this core gameplay loop in a way that is mechanically or thematically relevant. It allows us to see damage, yes, but it doesn't provide further information to the player in regards to solving a case than another non-destructive solution for bomber killers would. An example would be achieving the same effect by leaving an apartment intact but overlaying "soot" or explosive residue decals on the environment that you could scan to solve a bomber case. Same effect, you'd still be able to get chemicals and that could be used to trace back to the explosive supplier without the high cost of dynamically updating and modifying the environment.

Another note, the developer has openly stated that the player is equipped with a non-lethal arsenal. It's safe to assume that they won't really have the tools to modify / destroy the environment in a way that is disruptive to the actual geometry, which would be the only major benefit that implementing destruction that I could see for the core gameplay loop. That being said, I do love the idea of blowing down someone's wall to get into their apartment (would be goofy but fun) but that isn't really in line with the hard boiled detective noir fantasy that Shadows seems to be leaning for.

It is for these reasons that I would cautious against implementing destructible environments at runtime or really at all. Very costly with very limited added gameplay value. Now bomber enemies on the other hand is a very different discussion, but I'll leave that for another time!

These are my own thoughts on it. Doesn't mean they are right or wrong, just how I feel.

Also wrote this in a rush, hope it's not too messy!