Scrapyard Robot Rampage
Development cut short..
It's been a hot minute. A lot of stuff has happened. It's mostly drama, but we'll leave those parts out here.
Let's cut to the chase. Development on Scrapyard Robot Rampage has ended.
The publisher's parent company for the game has declared bankruptcy, and I cannot get in contact with them anymore. They just haven't replied to any of my calls or emails, and I'm not about to show up at their house just to get the cops called on me. Because of this, I cannot work on the game due to the split ownership.
I'm sad that it ended like this, but glad for everything that I learned along the way.
Currently, I cannot request to take the game down myself because the publisher is the only official admin. Otherwise, I would. In all honesty, this game is not nearly finished enough to be on Steam in the first place.
If you want a deeper story on some of this, feel free to join the discord server (Husky Operations discord server permanent invite link). It's completely locked down for archival's sake, but someone reading this in the future might be interested in what went down.
I want to thank the small number of people who purchased this game, as well as the one dude who actually reviewed it! I watched your review video! At first the negative review hurt, but I already knew that everything you said was true. In the updated version I was working slowly on, I made sure to work on everything you had brought up. I agreed with you on just about everything you said- even before the game had launched on Steam.
I also want to thank the small number of people who followed the development in the discord server. You all believed in me and what I was creating.
Again, I'm really sorry the game kinda shit the bed like this... I doubt that I myself will ever work on this game in the future because of how weird the legal ownership is, and what happened personally with the publisher. Maybe the one person left at the publisher will get someone else to work on it ten years down the line. Who knows..
But as of now, development on this game has halted for the far foreseeable future.
Thank you all involved for your time, thoughts, and support,
Symm
Dev Diary - 5/13/2019
I know it's been a while, and a lot of that is my own fault for just having the internal debate of "well it's been this long, so it's ok if I wait a little longer ... right?" I'll do my best to prevent that from happening in the future now.
Since the last announcement a couple major life things have happened, including the passing of my grandmother on my mother's side. We were pretty close, so it messed with me for about a month while that was all going on, and that happened almost immediately after I had posted the previous Dev Diary.
Other than that amount of time, I've been slowly building speed back up to making decent progress on the next iteration of the game. I haven't been focusing on any particular part of development, just kind of jumping around in to whatever is next in the line of "things to do" that's up in my head. We picked up a couple of important assets from the UE4 marketplace that I myself do not have the skill to do on my own, and I've redone the player weapon and movement controls for the third (and hopefully final) time so that it'll be extremely to expand with later on down the line.
As for the artsy side, we've finally settled on a cel shaded style with lowpoly models and limited colors. I've started work on moving my limited Maya knowledge in to Blender, and have been making progress on the model for the main character's arms for the first person view. I've also got more than a few weapons sketched out to flesh a couple models out for whenever I get to the 'make a bunch of new weapons' part of development. The first map is being worked on actively as I go or whenever I think of something that'd be neat to add to it. I've gone through a couple ideas for that one as well, but it's starting to look less like a dirt patch and more like what it's named- "The Scrapyard".
That's all from me for now. Like I mentioned at the start, I'm going to hold myself to posting these updates more often. It's not only a sign of life, but also a way for the community to know what's going on.
If you'd like to hear or see more about the game and you're interested in being part of the community, join our Discord! Every once in a while I'll post screenshots or short videos of what I'm currently working on. I promise we don't bite.
Cheers,
Symm