ScrapKings

A top-down wasteland roguelike: drive, fight, salvage, bolt modules onto sockets, then take bigger risks for better parts. Upgrades grant new behaviours rather than percentage modifiers, and the shape of your vehicle tells you what build you are running without a stats screen.

• A run loop of drive, fight, salvage, upgrade, escalate, with optional threats gating the strongest parts.
• Modules snap onto physical sockets on the vehicle, so a build is legible from its silhouette rather than just a menu.
• Upgrades grant new verbs such as drifting, ramming and slamming, instead of percentage modifiers.
• Hard roguelike progression: you start weak, and repeated runs make early areas trivial.

• Driving has to be fun with zero upgrades

  If the base handling is not enjoyable then upgrades are compensating for a broken core rather than building on a good one. That pillar set the bar for the first playable and it is the reason the project is paused rather than shipped.

• Behaviours over stat modifiers

  A plus five percent upgrade is invisible in play. Giving each module a new verb makes the choice at the shop a real one.

• Readable chaos

  The genre lives on screen density, but a player who cannot read a threat feels cheated rather than challenged. Clarity needs to be prioritised over visual fidelity.

This one is on pause, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise. The scope grew faster than I could keep up with and the summer of 2026 has been a glorious one. Due to pick it back up in October. Writing the design pillars down before building anything was the best decision on it: driving has to be fun with zero upgrades, behaviours over stat modifiers, readable chaos. Those three lines killed a lot of bad ideas cheaply.