History

About Scraps: Who Made Scraps and the Complete Scraps Development History

This page is about Scraps as a whole: what the game is, who built it, and, for anyone wondering what happened to Scraps game development after its early years, where it stands today. Scraps: Modular Vehicle Combat is a vehicular combat game in which players design a fighting vehicle out of separate parts, weapons, and armor before taking it into battle against other custom builds, single-player or online. It's listed in Wikipedia's "List of vehicular combat games" alongside a structured Wikidata record (Q124073307) confirming it as a Windows and Linux title distributed through Steam under App ID 350150, with both single-player and multiplayer modes.

About Scraps: What the Game Is

The core idea is straightforward on paper and considerably harder to build: instead of choosing between a handful of preset vehicles, players attach chassis pieces, wheels, weapons, and armor plating to build something specific to how they want to fight. Different weapons mounted at different points on a custom vehicle don't naturally share a single aim point, which became its own design problem. Borman's solution, documented in a Game Developer article on the game's aiming system, was a multi-crosshair display: one white "intent" crosshair showing where the camera is aimed, plus a separate colored crosshair for each weapon showing where it will actually fire.

That kind of detail, small, easy to miss, expensive to get right, runs through most of the game's development. Scraps was built in Unity over several years, largely by one person.

A separate Game Developer article, published in September 2015, covers a more technical problem: how to keep a single custom vehicle, assembled from a dozen or more independently moving parts, rendering as one draw call instead of dozens. Borman's solution reused Unity's skeletal-animation bone system, normally built for character rigs, to move vehicle parts as though they were bones on a skeleton. It was a clever, period-specific workaround; Unity's rendering pipeline has changed substantially since, and the current approach to the same problem is covered on this site's Dev Notes pages rather than repeated here. What the article shows, alongside the aiming-system piece, is a developer willing to write in detail about engineering trade-offs most players never see, not just the parts of development that make for an easy highlight reel.

Who Made Scraps

Who made Scraps? A New Zealand-based developer named Bill Borman, working under the handle "nition," built the game substantially alone. He's also the author behind an open-source octree implementation on GitHub, Nition/UnityOctree, which he describes in the project's own documentation as written "for my game Scraps" and later generalized for wider use by other Unity developers. The repository is still live and still occasionally cited in Unity development circles today.

Two facts about who made Scraps matter more than any studio credit on a store page: it was substantially a one-person project for most of its life, and that person wrote about the process in public, on this site's original devlog and on Game Developer, rather than keeping it behind closed doors. A 2014 devlog post mentions Scraps being shown at PAX Australia that year alongside two other New Zealand-made games, Phantasmal and Swordy, part of a small wave of Kickstarter-funded New Zealand indies making the rounds at conventions in the mid-2010s. The rest of this page is about Scraps' development and where the game stands now, not just about who built it.

Scraps Development History, From Kickstarter to Steam

The short answer to what happened to Scraps game development after its 2013 Kickstarter is that it kept going for the better part of a decade. The campaign ran November 23 to December 18, 2013, raising $29,639 NZD against a $23,000 NZD goal, and the game cleared Steam Greenlight within about three and a half weeks of the campaign's start. From there, development continued in public: dozens of dev-update posts, a PAX Australia showing in late 2014, a wrapped-up navmesh and AI system by mid-2015, and Steam Early Access starting on July 7, 2015. The game didn't fully exit Early Access until December 18, 2020, seven years to the day after the Kickstarter campaign had closed.

The fuller Scraps development history, told in chronological order with the individual dev-update milestones, lives on this site's dedicated development timeline rather than repeated in full here. None of that Scraps game history is exotic by solo-developer standards, but it's unusually well documented, because Borman wrote about most of it as it happened rather than reconstructing it afterward for a press kit.

People searching for what happened to Scraps game after its Kickstarter years usually mean one of two things: is it still being updated, or can you still buy it. The next section covers both, plainly.

Where to Find Scraps Today

Scraps was sold exclusively through Steam. According to Steam's own store page, the listing now carries a notice that the game "is no longer available on the Steam store." Community game-preservation records, including the tracking site Delisted Games, date the removal to February 2023, following a developer announcement that Scraps had been selling very few copies and was running on a version of Unity old enough that a proper technical update was no longer practical. Players who already owned the game on Steam keep access to it in their library, and the underlying multiplayer code allows for privately hosted or open lobby games even without an official server running.

There is no active official storefront, download page, or press-kit contact for Scraps beyond that Steam listing's own history. The developer's devlog thread on Unity's own community forum, Unity Discussions, remains one of the more complete public records of the project, running to more than twenty pages and including the PAX Australia note referenced above. It isn't the whole Scraps development history, but between that thread and this site's own timeline, it covers most of what people ask about first.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

Scraps started as one developer's Kickstarter pitch for a customizable-vehicle combat game and ran for roughly a decade before Steam quietly delisted it. The Wikidata entry and Wikipedia listing will outlast the storefront it was sold on. For anyone curious about Scraps today, the honest summary is that it's no longer purchasable, still playable by anyone who already owns it, and thoroughly documented by the person who built it. That's the short version of Scraps game history; the fuller account, week by week, is on the site's development timeline.