History

The Complete Scraps Development History: From Kickstarter to Steam, an Indie Game Devlog Timeline

What follows is a chronological Scraps game development timeline, built mostly in Unity over roughly a decade by one New Zealand-based developer working under the handle "nition." This is the fuller Scraps development history, from Kickstarter to Steam Greenlight, through years of Early Access, and on to an eventual full release. Some entries carry exact dates drawn from the developer's own published accounts; others mark a milestone more broadly where the record is thinner.

This Indie Game Devlog Timeline, In Context

Read together, the entries below amount to an indie vehicle combat game devlog spanning 2013 to 2020, almost entirely written by the person building the game as it happened rather than pieced together from press coverage afterward. Few other indie vehicle combat game devlog projects ran this long in public without going quiet for a year or more at a stretch. As an indie game devlog timeline, its main distinction is simply that it doesn't have any long unexplained gaps. Treat this Scraps development history as a companion to the Kickstarter postmortem and about page rather than a replacement for either.

The Scraps Development History: Kickstarter to Steam

The short version of Kickstarter to Steam is twenty-five days of crowdfunding followed by a Greenlight approval a few weeks later. The longer version, covering the campaign itself and what actually got the game funded, is below. As a Scraps game development timeline this early stretch is the most eventful part, packing a Kickstarter run and a Greenlight vote into about two months.

1. c. 2012–2013
   Origin

   Work on what would become Scraps began quietly, without a public campaign or announcement behind it. By the time the developer marked "three years" of work on the project in a late-2015 post, that put the actual starting point somewhere around the end of 2012, well before the game had a Kickstarter page or a public name recognized outside a small circle of early testers.

2. October 2013
   v0.2.0

   An early public devlog update, numbered around version 0.2.0, went up ahead of any funding campaign, part of building an audience before asking anyone for money. Weekly and biweekly updates like this one were the primary way the project reached players in its first year, months before Kickstarter entered the picture.

3. November 23 – December 18, 2013
   Kickstarter

   The Scraps Kickstarter campaign ran for twenty-five days, closing at $29,639 NZD against a $23,000 NZD goal. Development didn't pause for the campaign's duration: a mid-campaign update covering a new vehicle part nicknamed the "cowcatcher" kept backers looking at fresh work rather than just a countdown timer. The full funding story, including where the pledges actually came from, is covered on the site's Kickstarter postmortem page.

4. January 2014
   Greenlight

   Scraps cleared Steam Greenlight, first through the informal Concepts stage (2,443 yes votes to 19 no), then the main round (8,529 yes to 4,417 no, a 66 percent approval), greenlit within about 10.5 days of the main round's opening. Counted from the Kickstarter campaign's start, the whole run to a Steam listing took roughly three and a half weeks.

From Early Access to a Full Release

Reaching Steam was the midpoint of this Scraps development history, not the end of it. What follows covers the five years between Greenlight and the game's eventual 1.0 release.

1. 2014
   PAX Prep

   With funding secured, work turned toward getting the game convention-ready, including rudimentary AI opponents so a demo build didn't depend entirely on two human players finding each other at a show floor. It was an early, rough pass rather than the finished AI system, but enough to put in front of an audience.

2. November 2014
   PAX Australia

   Scraps was shown at PAX Australia 2014, one of three New Zealand-made games at the show alongside Phantasmal and Swordy, a detail the developer mentioned directly on Unity's own community forum: "Scraps (my game), Phantasmal, and Swordy were the NZ games" there. It was a rare in-person outing for a project otherwise built and marketed almost entirely through devlog posts.

3. Early 2015
   Playtesting

   Ahead of a wider release, development shifted toward internal playtesting and a candid look at where Unity itself made certain problems harder than they needed to be. A devlog post from this period aired a personal wishlist of engine features and fixes, the kind of specific, unglamorous feedback that only comes from months of hitting the same wall.

4. May 2015
   Navmesh

   A long-running effort to get AI vehicles navigating the game's terrain reliably was finally wrapped up, closing out what the developer called, with some relief, "the navmesh saga." The underlying pathfinding approach, and how AI navigation techniques like it hold up in modern Unity, is covered in more technical detail on the site's navmesh page.

5. July 7, 2015
   Early Access

   Scraps launched into Steam Early Access, moving from a devlog-and-demo project to a game anyone could buy and play in its unfinished state. Early Access would end up running for more than five years.

6. December 2015
   Three Years

   A retrospective devlog post marked three years of development on Scraps, several months into its Early Access life. It's the kind of milestone post solo developers write more for themselves than for an audience, a way of taking stock before the next stretch of work.

7. 2016
   Core Systems

   A cluster of foundational systems took shape through the year: multiplayer networking work, the vehicle-building tools that let players actually assemble a custom machine piece by piece, and environment rendering, including how trees and terrain were handled in Unity to keep large maps performant. Multiplayer specifically, and the client-side prediction techniques behind it, are covered separately on the site's multiplayer page.

8. 2016–2017
   Terrain & Repair

   An experimental deformable-terrain test made it into a devlog post, introduced with the kind of caution that suggested it wouldn't ship in full ("don't get your hopes up too much" was close to the framing). Vehicle modification and repair mechanics, letting players patch up or repair a damaged vehicle mid-game, got their own dedicated development pass around the same period.

9. 2017
   v0.5.x

   A run of point updates, versions 0.5.0 through 0.5.2, shipped through the year. The skidmark rendering effect made a notable comeback in this window, popular enough with other Unity developers that a technical write-up of the technique picked up backlinks and, later, a translated write-up on an unrelated developer's blog. The current version of that technique is covered on the site's skidmark effect page.

10. 2018
    Singleplayer

    A "true" single-player mode arrived, an acknowledgment that a multiplayer-first vehicle combat game still needed a real solo experience rather than an afterthought bot match. A new "dust bowl" map and accompanying gameplay elements rounded out the year's content additions.

11. 2019
    Progression

    Work went into a progression system, giving players a reason to keep coming back beyond a single match, a fairly standard addition for a live-serviced vehicle combat game by this point in its life but a substantial build regardless.

12. 2019–2020
    Gauntlet Mode

    A six-part devlog series documented the development of Gauntlet Mode, a sustained content push suggesting a deliberate final stretch of feature work as the game moved toward a full release rather than staying indefinitely in Early Access.

13. November–December 2020
    1.0 Release

    Updates shifted to a fortnightly cadence in the final weeks before release, one of the last visible signs of active, regular development. Scraps exited Steam Early Access and reached its full 1.0 release on December 18, 2020, seven years to the day after its Kickstarter campaign had closed.

Epilogue

Not every indie game devlog timeline gets a clean ending; most stall out quietly, years before anything like a 1.0 ships. This one has a definite final chapter.

1. February 2023
   Epilogue

   Scraps was delisted from the Steam store, following a developer announcement that sales had fallen close to zero and that the game was running on a version of Unity old enough to make further updates impractical. Players who already owned it kept access to their library copy, and the game's multiplayer code still allows privately hosted or open lobby games without an official server running. That's the Scraps development history in full, at least the parts documented well enough to state plainly. More on where the game stands now is covered on the about page.

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