Scum development roadmap teases vehicles, base building, and missions
The developers of Scum, the open-world survival game with the dressable, growable, uncontrollable dongs, have shared their development plans for the next three months. If those plans go well, they'll bring new vehicle physics to the game, base building, a complete overhaul of the inventory system, and reworks to the cooking and metabolism systems.
"Right now, the vehicle mechanics in the game are still very basic, but we’re going to try and push more towards realism. For example, the car’s center of gravity will shift depending on the number of people in the car," the update says. The vehicle damage system is also being changed, "which means the car will react differently depending on whether you shot at its tire or the engine."
Cars can be claimed, locked, lockpicked, hotwired, and refueled. Damaged cars—because you know that's going to happen—will be repairable. Players will also be given a new, upgradeable "driving skill," which will impact their abilities behind the wheel, and eventually they'll be able to shoot from within vehicles as well, although that's further down the road.
The initial run at base building will be "very basic," with players getting the ability to build a house from a blueprint, the same way they currently build shelters. But the developers are also working on other "urban assets" including a quarry, a mine, a mental hospital, an old castle, a salt mine, an observatory, and a whole new city—exactly the sorts of things you'd expect to run across on a desert island dumping ground for psycho killers.
Updates to the "clunky and unintuitive" inventory will be both visual and mechanical: The new system will enable players to stack and rotate items, the "vicinity function" is changing, and cars and chests will also get their own inventory space. New skills and weapons are also coming, as are Scum's first missions, a proper tutorial, and achievements, which will be either funny or cringey depending on how it all shakes out.
The one bump in the roadmap is that the plan to add female characters, which the developers had hoped to have in place for Valentine's Day, has been postponed. There's an obligatory "too hard to animate" joke in the update, but the developers said that the job really is a lot bigger than they initially expected.
"Along the way we realized there’s a lot more to the whole thing and we can’t just stick a female model on the male mechanics and call it a day. Remember how we have this elaborate metabolism system and how I already mentioned that Bruno is reworking the cooking skill which also ties into the metabolism? Yeah, that. Every piece of clothing needs to be adjusted for the female body, too," they wrote.
"This doesn’t mean we stopped working on the female characters—we still are, but we really don’t want to half-ass this, so we’ll just postpone them for a bit. I said for a bit, so please stop screaming, time is a social construct anyway."
The team warned that all of this is contingent upon everything going to plan, which doesn't always happen, so don't take it as carved in stone.
"We have calculated the amount of work we can do and we’re going to try our hardest to stick to it. That’s something we’re usually good at," the developers wrote. "However, any dev anywhere can confirm that you just never know. Life happens. People get sick. There might be an alien invasion and we all might die. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen, but if it does, don’t say we didn’t warn you."
