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The Scraps Kickstarter Campaign: An Indie Game Kickstarter Postmortem on Steam Greenlight

In November 2013, a solo developer in New Zealand put a customizable-vehicle combat game up on Kickstarter with a funding goal of $23,000 NZD. Twenty-five days later the campaign had raised $29,639 NZD, and within a few more weeks the project cleared Steam Greenlight. This Scraps Kickstarter postmortem leans on the developer's own account of the campaign, published on Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra), to walk through what actually worked, what surprised him, and why the underlying numbers matter more than the usual "we went viral" version of an indie funding story.

The Scraps Kickstarter Campaign Begins

The campaign ran from November 23 to December 18, 2013: twenty-five days, no extension. Bill Borman, working under the handle "nition" and building Scraps largely alone, set a goal of $23,000 NZD, modest even by 2013 Kickstarter standards for a 3D vehicle-combat game built in Unity. By the close, backers had pledged $29,639 NZD, worth roughly $24,000 USD at the time. After payment-processing fees and a handful of declined or failed pledges, the net figure landed at $26,470.67 NZD, a number Borman included in his own postmortem rather than rounding it away.

That precision is worth noticing. A lot of crowdfunding retrospectives round up to make the story sound tidier. This one doesn't.

Why This Is an Indie Game Kickstarter Postmortem Worth Reading

Plenty of crowdfunding write-ups amount to a highlight reel: the day it hit 50%, the stretch goal that almost happened, a thank-you to backers. Borman's is closer to an audit. The single most useful figure he shared is that 71 percent of pledges came from outside Kickstarter's own browse-and-discovery traffic. The platform's internal algorithm did not find Scraps its backers; his own outreach, forum posts, and press contacts did. That's one of the indie game Kickstarter postmortem lessons buried in the raw numbers rather than the highlight reel: less flattering than "we got featured," and considerably more useful than most of it.

If you're weighing whether to run your own campaign off the back of a Kickstarter listing alone, that 71 percent figure is worth sitting with. A project page is a landing page. It is not, on its own, a marketing plan.

From Kickstarter to Steam Greenlight

Kickstarter success didn't guarantee a Steam release on its own in 2013 and 2014. Valve's now-retired community-voting system, Greenlight, still stood between a funded project and an actual store page. Scraps cleared the informal Concepts stage first, with 2,443 yes votes against 19 no, a lopsided margin that barely counts as a contest. The main Greenlight vote was closer: 8,529 yes to 4,417 no, a 66 percent approval rate, and the game was greenlit within 10.5 days of that main round opening. Counted from the Kickstarter campaign's own start date, Borman described the whole run to a Steam Greenlight approval as roughly three and a half weeks.

Ten days is fast for a vote that, in 2014, still relied on strangers clicking through a public queue of hundreds of other hopeful games. It says something about how much of the campaign's outside marketing had already reached the same audience that would later vote on Greenlight.

Design and Engineering, Told in Public

The Scraps Kickstarter campaign wasn't the last time Borman wrote candidly about the project for an outside audience. Two years later, in a piece for Game Developer on the game's aiming system, he explained a problem specific to vehicle combat with detachable weapons: guns mounted at different points on a customizable chassis don't share the camera's single aim point. His fix was a multi-crosshair display, one white "intent" crosshair plus a colored crosshair per weapon. In his own words: "the white cross-hair is where you're currently aiming, and the various coloured cross-hairs show where your selected weapons are actually aiming."

A separate technical article, published on Game Developer in September 2015, covered a rendering trick specific to Scraps: batching independently moving vehicle parts into a single mesh by borrowing Unity's skeletal-animation bone system for a purpose it wasn't designed for, so a vehicle built from a dozen parts could still render as one draw call. It's a period-specific solution; Unity's renderer has changed substantially since, and the site's own Dev Notes pillar covers the current approach to the same problem. But it's a fair example of the kind of unglamorous engineering work that ran alongside the funding story, largely invisible to backers checking their pledge total.

A Steam Greenlight Solo Developer Story, Not Just a Funding One

It's easy to read a Kickstarter postmortem purely as a fundraising case study and miss that the harder part came after the money arrived. A Steam Greenlight solo developer doesn't get a marketing department or a QA team once the campaign ends; Borman kept building, documenting, and shipping updates to Scraps for years afterward, first through Steam Early Access starting in mid-2015 and eventually through a 1.0 release. The Kickstarter total funded a beginning, not a finish line.

Third-party records back up how far the project traveled from that 2013 campaign. Scraps is listed in Wikipedia's "List of vehicular combat games," alongside a structured Wikidata entry (Q124073307) recording it as a Windows and Linux title with both single-player and multiplayer modes, distributed through Steam under App ID 350150. None of that existed yet when the Kickstarter page went live; it's the paper trail a small, self-funded project leaves once the internet has had a decade to catalogue it.

What the Numbers Still Say

Strip away the narrative and the Scraps Kickstarter postmortem comes down to a short list of figures: a $23,000 NZD goal, $29,639 NZD raised, a 66 percent Greenlight approval, and a 71 percent external-traffic share that did most of the real work. None of those numbers are dramatic by the standards of the biggest Kickstarter game campaigns of that era. That's arguably the point. The indie game Kickstarter postmortem lessons that outlast a single campaign tend to be about attention and follow-through, not about hitting some record-setting total.

Borman's own five-tips piece on running a Kickstarter campaign, also published on Game Developer, distilled much of this into practical advice for other developers rather than a victory lap. Reading it now, next to the original Scraps postmortem, the two pieces agree with each other: a modest, well-marketed goal beat a big one, and the platform's own discovery tools were never going to do the work alone.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

The clean version of this story is "solo developer gets funded, gets greenlit, ships game." The messier and more useful version is in the specific numbers Borman chose to publish: a modest goal, a 71 percent external-traffic share, a Greenlight vote that swung on ten days rather than ten weeks. None of it required a breakout viral moment. It required a Kickstarter page that was ready before the campaign launched, and a developer willing to spend the following seven years still working on the thing he'd asked strangers to fund. For any Steam Greenlight solo developer chasing a similar launch today, that ratio between outside outreach and the platform's own discovery traffic is the number worth remembering, not the total raised.