Alright, so I think we’ve made our final cut.

We’re going with SCRAPHEAP.

I’ve been going back and forth about this because there’s a massive amount of work in these three games. I even started wondering whether we could smash them all together somehow. It’s hard to look at how much has happened and decide which one gets the rest of the jam.

But I’ve also done a ridiculous amount of cackling while playing SCRAPHEAP.

That’s kind of hard to argue with.

Feral Divinity

Feral Divinity has come a long way. Earlier today, there was a lot of flat green ground and placeholder stuff. Now the island is filling out with trees, grass, buildings, and the creature wandering around the village. The ocean goes out to the horizon, and the UI has had a pass with wooden panels instead of the placeholder boxes.

The Claude working on it sent over a writeup of the day. Villagers are gathering, eating, sleeping and building on their own, and carrying actual logs, stones and food around. There’s a proper 3D god hand for picking things up, and the creature has feeding, leashes and a showdown with the rival bear. Miracles unlock with faith and work within your influence, around the temple, creature or converts.

So there’s a lot more here than just making the island look nicer. But when I actually played it, it was still too abstract for me to really have fun with.

Feral Divinity’s village with the pangolin creature, villagers, a 3D god hand, wooden HUD panels and miracle icons.
Feral Divinity later in the day, with the village, god hand and updated UI. View full-size image.
The Feral Divinity trailer.

Watch the Feral Divinity trailer on YouTube.

The Price of Power

The Price of Power came off the swarm, and we got the frontier agents working through the handoff, connecting the systems and starting to give it some art treatment.

That turned into quite a lot of work. Painted dungeon textures, a painterly filter, torchlight, arches and props. The UI got a health orb, painted ability icons, gold prices and tooltips, which is a pretty big improvement over a row of overlapping labels.

Side-by-side comparison of The Price of Power’s old HUD and updated health orb, ability icons and compact minimap.
The Price of Power UI before and after the polish pass. View full-size image.

The character work also meant fixing some fairly ridiculous generated-rig problems. Characters walking backwards, cloth tearing, and a base-colour texture ending up in a normal-map slot. The Claude’s writeup also covers bribed and bought-out enemies following you between floors, combat feedback, and work on the hub town and boss.

I still have a Diablo problem. I still like the idea of having to choose between spending money on equipment, spells, or bribing enemies. But playing it, it felt like yet another Diablo clone.

The Price of Power’s Hollow Castellan boss encounter in a dark stone dungeon with the updated HUD.
The Hollow Castellan encounter from the end-of-day progress bundle. View full-size image.

SCRAPHEAP

And then there’s SCRAPHEAP.

This one made me cackle with glee as I shredded another car.

It’s had a lot of polish too. The garage has the candy-coloured UI now, the cars have glitter on them, and the arena is filling out with toy blocks, striped ramps and giant plush cats watching the fight.

SCRAPHEAP’s garage with a pink and purple buggy, mounted buzzsaw, parts inventory and rounded purple UI panels.
The garage after its UI pass. View full-size image.

The three rounds go from sunny morning to golden hour to a disco night. There’s confetti and pastel scrap flying off the cars, explosive barrels, bigger guns and huge comic callouts when something gets totaled or squished.

SCRAPHEAP’s third-round introduction in a dark arena lit by pink and purple spotlights.
Round three gets the disco lights. View full-size image.

And a lot of the work was on things that would get in the way of actually enjoying it. Enemies pinning you, cars getting stuck under ramps, or flipping over and staying there. The update has enemies doing hit-and-run attacks and cars righting themselves, with an UPSY-DAISY callout for good measure. You can swap and move parts around in the garage too.

A SCRAPHEAP enemy car breaking apart amid confetti, flying wheels and a large TOTALED callout.
This is the one that kept making me cackle. View full-size image.

I wanted to build the three prototypes and find out which one was the most entertaining. And apparently cute cats smashing each other up in ridiculous cars is my answer.

SCRAPHEAP at this point in the jam.

Watch the montage on YouTube.

So that’s where the rest of the jam is going. More polish on SCRAPHEAP, and getting it ready for the submission.

I’m still glad we built the other two. This was a massive scope experiment, and now I have three games to work with. For this jam, though, I’m going with the one that keeps making me laugh.