Enormous explosions, waves of enemies and bullet storms are all par for the course, backed by the screen-filling pyrotechnics you've come to expect from this developer. Housemarque's approach in realising the digital carnage is intriguing: environments are created from hundreds of thousands of cubes, each of which is individually animated by GPU-accelerated physics.
"The entire environment - everything - is built up from these voxels," explains Kruger. "All of the cubes that you see flying around - there's no gimmick, no point sprites, it's not a particle effect, they're actual physical cubes. In gameplay, dynamic cubes with collisions, floating around, you can get up to 200,000. Our engine supports up to 500,000 but in actual gameplay scenarios, it rarely goes over 200K."
The technology behind the cube-based construction of each level is as typically ingenious as you would expect from a Housemarque title.
"It's actually pretty interesting tech because as you can see, the environments are fully destructible and both the background and the gameplay ring are loaded from 3D textures - and then they're polygonised on the fly," Kruger says.
"So basically what happens is that the mesh for the actual background geometry is generated, then when an explosion happens and a part of it is chipped away, that particular segment is reconstructed. That's what's happening on the GPU side with compute shaders - but with nice performance."
Resogun's aesthetic is almost entirely defined by its remarkable physics, and it's a match made in heaven with the compute-heavy skew of the PlayStation 4 hardware. Harry Kruger reels off a list of the various non-render based effects that utilise the PS4 graphics hardware.
"We're using compute shaders for a lot of things like the Overdrive particles you see later, the lightning up there - that's all done on GPU. The actual cubes - the physics and the collisions that you see bouncing, the geometry - that's all done on the GPU-side," he says, before going into more depth on how the 3D texturing works on the 'ring' - the gameplay layer of the environment.
"For the ring, it's the same thing as the background but slightly different tech because here we have one 3D texture that's basically one long rectangular prism. We use these bent cubes, or curved cubes - that's a better way of putting it. Every time an explosion happens these are essentially detached from the world."