ABRISS

ABRISS hardly needs an introduction — its surreal worlds, brutalist structures, and hypnotic destruction have already caught your eye. So let’s jump straight into our interview with the team behind it.

…so let’s jump straight into the interview with Johannes Knop, Chairman and Developer at Randwerk, the team behind ABRISS.

Could you tell us how your team started this project, and what your background is?

During the first COVID lockdowns in the summer of 2020, Friedrich and Till approached me and asked if I wanted to work on something based on a game they had made as a university project a couple of semesters earlier. The game was called Antitect, and it was all about destroying stuff. It was very different from ABRISS, but that’s where everything originated.

Till, Friedrich, and I all studied game design together at HTW Berlin. We had worked as interns and on many university projects, but ABRISS is our first commercial game, and we’re very happy that people like it.

You write that you’re a Cooperative on your website. What does that mean?

It’s basically a democratic company. We try to make all major decisions together so everyone can participate. This model is also used in the USA, France, and the UK — for example by Motion Twin, creators of Dead Cells.
It’s important to us to make the game industry a little nicer for ourselves. As far as we know, we’re the first cooperative game studio in Germany!

How did you come up with this concept? Any inspirations?

As mentioned, ABRISS grew out of our earlier university prototype. Of course we looked at other destruction-based games like Besiege or Teardown, but they’re quite different.
We were mostly inspired by grand brutalist architecture, the beauty of collapsing structures, the city we live in, and its electronic music culture.

Great sound design, fantastic visual assets, impressive FX, and a stunning soundtrack. Was all of this made in-house?

Yes, all in-house. We used some sample packs for sound design, but most were heavily modified. Friedrich made all the 3D models, and Till created all the VFX.
We used tools with presets where needed — some UI button sounds, for example — but everything was adapted and crafted by us. It was a lot of work.

In every ABRISS level you see millions of debris pieces flying. Technically, how did you achieve such strong performance even on basic PCs and laptops?

We get that question a lot. The answer is actually simple:

A: There aren’t nearly as many physical objects as it looks.
B: And performance isn’t always great — you just don’t notice.

We use GPU particles for tons of tiny debris. They look physical but don’t interact with anything and disappear quickly. Larger units only spawn smaller units when destroyed.
It’s lots of optimization to make it look like chaos without simulating actual chaos.

Performance can drop during the most intense scenes — from 60 FPS down to 30 — but thanks to time dilation, slow motion, and the slower camera movement, most players never notice.

Could you tell us about your experience with Unity and how HDRP helped achieve ABRISS’ look?

HDRP is essential to our visual style — especially the volumetric fog. The extensive post-processing options were also a huge help; HDRP simply offers more than URP or Legacy.

It does have issues, though. Sometimes we spent forever hunting bugs, only to discover that a single checkbox needed to be disabled. And HDRP shows a black screen on unsupported PCs — which has caused some Steam refunds.

ABRISS levels feel like pieces of art. Did you build your own level editor or any notable internal tools?

We tried building a custom level editor because we considered releasing it publicly and using it to speed up our workflow, but building a level editor is extremely hard. We’d still love to create one someday, but it might not be feasible within our time and budget.

We do have some small internal tools — for example a button to reset the save file, or one that takes a screenshot at the correct resolution for a level preview.

Are you planning any virtual reality integration?

To be honest, it would be a lot of work and the VR market is still small — we’d basically burn money.
There’s also a technical issue: HDRP’s VR pipeline is separate, so we’d have to switch render pipelines. And even then, VR input systems would need to be built from scratch.

So no, probably not.

Do you mind sharing some details about the tools/plugins your team uses most, and how they help?

Friedrich mostly used Blender and Substance Painter/Designer for all visual assets. Blender being essentially free was a huge advantage, plus it has many useful small plugins.
I personally liked working in JetBrains Rider, which I find more usable and customizable than the standard IDE.
For music and sound I used FL Studio.