Here’s a bit of a Scraps retrospective on the journey so far.

In 2012 I left my previous job and have been working on Scraps full-time for about three years now, mostly on my own, but with some contract work more recently from Dave doing the AI and helping to get the Internet/Steamworks connectivity up and running. Its been a while, but then doing all the design, coding, art, modelling, sound, music etc yourself is always going to take a while. I probably scoped this game a lot bigger than I should have originally, but it’s starting to look a lot like the game I always imagined playing.

Scraps is a Unity engine game that uses uLink and Steamworks for networking. I use Blender for modelling, Photoshop CS5 for image editing, and Pro Tools 8 for music and sound (and Audacity for minor edits). I don’t really use any major assets from the Asset Store. I do like the Ramp Brush.

In December 2012 Scraps looked like this:

This is 2-3 months into development, and the concept is really pretty well matched to the current game. Build vehicles, drive and fight them, and play around with physics. Gameplay here is just building and testing – there’s no combat – but you can drive your vehicles, albeit with a few bugs that you don’t see here.

It’s funny how things always get up and running quite fast and then get progressively slower. You’ll see it in every game project. Prototyping and getting the basics working is fast, then finishing that stuff takes forever. But at least at this point I already had a good idea that the game idea was going to work. I’d been thinking about playing a fully customisable vehicle combat game like this since Interstate ’76 in 1997.

Trying out some logos, Dec 2012 and January 2013:





For some reason I already had a really nice settings system in January 2013. Priorities…

January 2013, trying out graphical styles.

The current, final style that Scraps uses now is a sort of light paper texture over fairly basic colours, baked in Ambient Occlusion, and a black outline like a much more subtle version of the second image above. The black outlines automatically turn off if your anti-aliasing setting would make them look too jaggy.

Sometime during February 2013, I made proper models in Blender for all the boxy placeholder parts.





And by the end of February 2013 Scrapsgame.com was up and running and vehicles looked like this:

Too bad the grass was still hideous. Check out those bullet casings in the video; the game still supports them in the back-end, but they’re turned off because I never found a solution that both looked good and performed well. When you have fully-physics based casings flying around everywhere though, it does look glorious (and runs terribly):

I also made the Builder Demo available for free to the public from very early on, and people immediately started making incredible stuff that absolutely destroyed the performance of my then primitive unoptimised game.

These wonderful designs are from this forum thread, starting from July 2013:

Since then performance has got much better, and outside of testing mode there are limits on vehicle cost, but I’m still on a continuing quest to improve game performance. Things are certainly much better than they used to be.

By November 2013 I was getting basic multiplayer working, with some general craziness to get Unity’s physics working over the Internet and a semi-authoritative server without input lag on the client.

That’s not actually the main game at all – it’s a separate multiplayer prototype app that I made initially, using some of the assets from the main game. That let me test a basic multiplayer framework in isolation before trying to wrangle it into all the other code.

The next month in December 2013 I ran a Kickstarter campaign for Scraps that was ultimately successful, and helped me get the funds to keep working on what was already becoming a long project. I wrote a big postmortem on that here.

Multiplayer was a long task to get going well, though other things were always getting added the the game along the way. Here’s LAN testing in June 2014 in the main game, on a new map called DustBowl:

The game also has more graphical effects than it used to there: Dust from the terrain and screen shake being the main ones.

In August 2014, I see we have damage effects on parts:

From September 2014, here’s the first proper LAN playtest with some friends, on a then-incomplete map called SandyBridge:

At the end of October 2014 I took Scraps to PAX Australia where it had a good reception, with three laptops set up playing in LAN. Also a great way to stress-test your game! And certainly some bugs came up, but nothing that ruined the day. Was the exposure worth the cost of going? I’m not sure.

November 2014: In this video you can see heat/cooling, power, wreckage collection, and new weapon types. And the Test Map grass isn’t quite as hideous anymore.

Dave was also underway coding some AI to be used for single-player or to join in on multiplayer games:

Finally in July 2015, I launched Scraps on Steam Early Access, with single-player and multiplayer combat (Internet or LAN) working.

Sales so far are… modest, but the reception is good. The next major mode I’m looking at adding is a single-player one which will help differentiate the game from a few other similar concepts that have appeared since I started development – the likes of Robocraft or TerraTech (some more direct comparison with Robocraft here) – and also help alleviate the fact that Internet multiplayer has been pretty quiet lately.

Since launching, Scraps has seen a bunch of balance work, a few new features, a few new parts:

a low gravity mode:

and most recently a new map called RiverRift:

I think you can still see some of the initial inspiration from Interstate ’76 so many years ago:

More stuff to come.