Lego Car Wars: Build A Rolling, Disastrous Gunwall In Scraps
Malformed iguana made of engine parts
They told me I was crazy. They told me my head wasn't screwed on right - that it was all nuts and bolts rattling around inside. They claimed my ideas were "laughably lethal" and "wait no I'm not laughing anymore because a prototype of one of your ideas is currently running me over and shooting me at the same time." But Scraps - a build-your-own wheeled guncar monstrosity game that's now on Kickstarter - will let me show them all. Oh yes. My colleagues at the Lego Racers and Kerbal Space Program University of Engineering, an Ivy League institution, won't even know what hit 'em. Well, at least once I make my car do the thing where its wheels stay on the ground and not, um, anywhere else. I took some video of my attempts for your amusement and - ahem - educational enrichment. You can view that below.
Scraps' Kickstarter is asking for $23,000 NZD, and assuming it goes careening past the finish line - injuring hundreds in the process - it'll add more parts, more customization options, and evolve into this thing:
"Scraps is a little bit like Kerbal Space Program except the spaceships are vehicles and they fight. Scraps will be a primarily multiplayer game. Single-player will be the same modes as multiplayer, but with AI players. A career mode where you earn money to upgrade your vehicles and progress would be nice, but is simply outside the scope of a one-man dev team."
"Initially standard Deathmatch (all-against-all melee) and Team Deathmatch modes will be available. Think Twisted Metal. Later I'd like to add race modes and so on, but these will depend on the game doing well enough to sustain development. Here's hoping it does because I really want to keep working on this. There will also be a sandbox mode where you can simply construct and test vehicles with unlimited available funds."
I am intrigued. The current demo is pretty barebones and the building interface needs some work, but there's definitely potential. If all goes according to plan, an alpha will launch toward the middle of 2014, with a 1.0 release following When It's Done. Who fancies giving this one a push?