Scraps: Modular Vehicle Combat - Vehicle combat with buildable vehicles

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July 7 2015: Scraps is now available on Steam.

Original post, December 2012:

☆Scraps is a vehicle combat game where you build your vehicle from parts.☆

I’ve always really liked the extensive car customisation in Interstate '76. A while after it came out, I also played a demo of Stratosphere: Conquest Of The Skies (does anyone else remember that?) where you could build your flying fortress from parts, and I started thinking of a game like the melee mode in I76, but with more customisation of the car itself.

Later I got a demo of LEGO Racers where you could build your own car from scratch. Awesome! Except it wasn’t, because the parts were all cosmetic and any effect your creation had on the car’s stats was dubious at best. I want to be able to build a car that SUCKS. A car that falls over whenever it corners or only has enough power to fire its guns once a minute. I want each component you place to actually have a function, and have a physical effect. Not to the point of adding needless complexity to the game, like having to wire everything together; just obvious things, like your vehicle being lop-sided if you put all your guns on one side.

All those games came out last century. I’ve been waiting so long for someone to make a game like this that I gave up and I’m making it myself. I’m excited about this project because I finally get to play it.

Here are some really early screenshots of Scraps (placeholder/buggy/missing stuff everywhere):


Build screen, then In-Game

TL;DR: It’s like Kerbal Space Program except the spaceships are vehicles and they fight.

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New Stuff:

Screenshots:



Video:

Early Access Launch Trailer.

Download:

You can now try the Builder Demo which lets you build vehicles and test them out.
Get It Here

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6 Likes
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Awesome!

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Ahhh, stratosphere… I wasted many hours of my life playing that game. Sucks that I lost the CD a long time ago, I kind of want to play it again.

This game looks like a great idea. I haven’t seen games that let you customize your vehicles where each part affects the vehicle in some way. Looking forward to updates.

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Just looking at the IndieDB Top 100 Indies list for this year. There isn’t even a category for vehicle games, or racing games. They have “Tactical Shooter” I guess. Clearly to get your fill of sweet vehicle combat, you will need to play Scraps.

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Looks awesome man. Are you gonna include online multiplayer? That would make it awesome, have like a twisted metal online type feel to it and battle others with your own car. Maybe also have sharable cars that you can download other’s cars. The industry has a lot of followers that LOVE sharability and customization. Looking forward to more of this.

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Definitely will have local and online multiplayer. It has to really because fighting other people’s vehicles is the crux of the game. I doubt there’ll be a single-player campaign/career mode, at least not in the first release.

I really like the way Gimbal lets you share your ships via an image of the ship, whatever magic is going on there.

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i like your idea, Bookmarked :wink:

m;

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Lololol interesting idea, besides the multiplayer mode you could create a puzzle mode like that Bad Piggies game, but in 3D or something like.

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Not an exciting update by any means, but in the interests of showing that I’m doing something; I made this logo:

I have some minor problems with it but I don’t have the designer’s eye to make it better. Is it obvious, at least, that the parts are meant to be in the process of slotting into place?

11

Been messing around with a different logo design:

But in the game I’ve been implementing an input manager and adding controller support. Yeah, Unity has an input manager built in, but it’s a bit lame how you can only edit it in the little prelauncher window before starting the game.

It’s not perfect - you can’t assign axis inputs to buttons or buttons to axes - but it’s working pretty well.

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Yea, it’s obvious that they are slotting into place. I liked the blue log o better :stuck_out_tongue: bookmarked.

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Graphics options…

A bit of real DevLog content:

Unity is a good system, but once you start seriously making Unity games, you also run into some limitations. Limitations which are inherent in the system, at a level you can’t access.

I find it quite interesting to see how other Unity games solve or work around the limitations.

For instance, Unity has no Dropdown/Combo Box GUI class, so I made one (I needed a more custom solution than what’s on the Unify wiki). That’s fine - that’s not a limitation in what you can do, just in what’s already done. Unfortunately Unity provides no way to consume clicks. As in, if you have a dropdown covering a button, you’ll click through and activate both. Why is there no way to consume clicks…?

Anyway, you can work around it in various ways. Personally I’m detecting that a dropdown is open and disabling anything that might be underneath it while it’s open. But it’s a always bit messy.

Next problem is that most, but not all, of the graphics options that you can change with Unity’s Quality Settings system are available to change via code. Why can’t I set shadow type for instance?

Anyway, sometimes I think to myself, “I’ll see what other Unity games did.” Almost always, they didn’t. But now I know why. Check out the Kerbal Space Program graphics options for instance. They have pretty much the same options as me, because they’re the ones you can access in Unity. Then see how no GUI components ever overlap each other?

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agree, but i guess thats the price of having a stable tool… we just can post suggestions and bug reports

e.g. Unity 4 added HW-Cursor support but when getting Input.mousePosition you only get the SW-Cursor XY creating an inevitable inherent mouseLag!

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Which looks better, the textured look or the cel-shaded?

469×634 59.3 KB

Of course you can also have textured with outline and cel-shaded with no outline, but trust me when I say they look worse than the options presented. One of the points for the latter option is that it’s just easier to do reasonably well. Obviously neither of these are final graphics, but the toony one already looks a bit less amateur than the textured one IMO.

And yes, those are still mostly placeholder models - obviously more detail would help the textured version.

16

This is really cool! The shaded one a little less bold would look good! That would just mean your art would have to match as well as your particle effects.

17

Well, it’s hard to decide without seeing environments, buts I also think the toony version looks better, and fits better with the overall style of the game, especially the:

I spent WAY to long looking at that…

Anyways, this game looks great! :smile:

18

I really like the look of the cartoon one.

It’s almost like borderlands, car style :stuck_out_tongue:

Great work, looks amazing

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Thanks, and yeah, I agree that it fits with the slightly less than serious style of the game itself.

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Combine the 2 a textured cartoon look, try and get the feel of borderlands, since this game reminds me of borderlands a lil.