Breaking down the completely destructible world of Deliver At All Costs

Summary

The article details how Far Out Games achieved a fully destructible world in 'Deliver At All Costs' (Unity, 2025). Key technical insights: each building is modeled in Blender with separated parts (roof, walls, windows), then fractured in Unity using custom tooling that assigns metadata for physics, particles, and sound. To maintain 60 fps, the team used aggressive culling leveraging the top-down camera (off-screen objects ignored), baked Unity's terrain system into a static mesh to avoid built-in LOD overhead, optimized decal rendering, and switched particle systems to unlit.

Physics challenges included cars rolling over (solved by increasing gravity when wheels leave ground) and civilians getting stuck in 36-part car colliders (simplified to fewer colliders). The cargo, like a marlin, used bones and forces for unique physics interactions. Damage was tweaked to match player expectations (e.g., increasing fall damage).

The result: ~95% of assets destructible, each destruction unique, with stable performance on PS5 and Xbox Series X. Actionable takeaways for ad ops: balancing real-time physics with performance requires custom pipelines, aggressive optimization of engine-default systems, and iterative testing with each asset.