Recently I’ve been finally adding some new parts that are needed for the full version. Remember this diagram from the Kickstarter?

I’m filling in the ???. I’m considering the minimum remaining parts needed before the initial early access release of Scraps to be the following:

1x Passive cooling part

1x Active cooling part (drains power to provide more cooling)

1x Energy weapon

1x Laser weapon

2x Special Kickstarter backer weapons

I’ve coded the heat and cooling systems and added the cooling parts already. Two passive heat sinks (they’re easy to make) and a small active cooling unit:

When your weapons generate heat, they try to pass that heat off to any cooling parts you have. If your cooling system reaches max heat, the weapons will start taking the heat themselves. If their heat gets too high, they’ll start taking damage. I think having overheating parts taking damage will be more fun than just saying “it’s too hot – you can’t shoot now.” You can push it to the limit!

It’s visual too. I made a mistake while coding the heat system that generated way too much heat – it made a good demo of the heat effect!

I’ve also been making the necessary weapons. I made a plasma artillery energy weapon:

The bullet drops pretty fast so it shoots in more of an arc, but it has a wide area of effect.

I’m also working on a laser weapon, but the 3D model isn’t finished. It kinda works though (plasma shown here too):

Now, this all means switching the standard gunpower weapons to mostly require cooling instead of power (they do still need a little bit of power). This was always the intention, but it’s been a while coming, so I know what you’re saying: “I’ll have to change all my existing vehicles to use cooling instead of power?” Yeah, I’m afraid you will. That’s why I’m adding this stuff before the full paid release. Please remember this game is still pre-alpha right now. I feel I should take a bit of time to update the builder demo though so at least it matches the new systems. I need to get everything into a nice stable state but I should have that up at the next update in a couple of weeks.

In terms of an overall timeline of what’s left to do before the first full release, it’s actually still quite a lot. I recently estimated out everything that’s left and it came out to finishing in…May. That’s looking further than I’d like and I’m sure it’s further than you’d like, but I really want to make sure the first release is worth buying as-is. Don’t ever fear that this project will just be abandoned though. The general TODO list looks something like this:

Finish adding the new parts

Improve the DustBowl map

Game balance testing, and writing some code to make part stat balancing easier

Proper setup for running a dedicated server (this might be able to skip being in the first release, but it’s near done anyway)

Add ability for players to join multiplayer games at any time (not just in the lobby)

Allow players to quit multiplayer games (they can quit now, but the server doesn’t handle it properly)

Internet play (LAN is working, but not Internet)

Scoreboard

General cleanup of bugs, TODOs etc

A bunch of other small tasks

Non-game stuff: Contacting press, creating a new trailer etc

The “players can join a game at any point” and the Internet play are the biggest tasks remaining. The guy I have doing the AI work – Dave Leaver – will probably also help with the Internet networking side of things as he has more experience in that area and he’s a top-notch programmer. Of course I’ve never set an official release date and I’m not about to, things will take as long as they take, but I really want to get this finished too.

Oh yeah, I’ve also done some tricks to get a decent performance boost in-game (mainly, combining everything I can on a vehicle into one since mesh instead of many), paving the way for more vehicles on-screen. You’ll also see when I put out a builder demo update that the in-game GUI has been redesigned a bit and now scales automatically to screen resolution.

Oh yeah, and the cockpit part now also looks a bit different (better?):

Phew. That was probably too much for one update but at least you know I’m working.