An independent game studio · Arnhem, NL
Games on their own terms.
Stray Dream Arts makes games with clear rules and worlds that don't explain themselves. The first one to stay is Scrapfit.
Now building · early demo
Scrapfit
A roguelike deckbuilder with no deck. Every skill, support and stat you loot is a Tetris-shaped block. Bolt them onto your board. Whatever touches, links.
The strongest blocks come in the most awkward shapes, so space is the scarcest thing you own.
Loot blocks
Skills hit, supports boost, stats keep you standing. Each drops Normal, Magic or Rare, with rolled affixes.
Fit them together
Blocks that touch link up. A support powers every skill it touches, and an amplifier cell doubles whatever sits on it.
Fight
No card draw: your whole board is your hand, every turn. Enemies show what they'll do next, then go after your board.
- 75
- Blocks to loot
- 39
- Enemies
- 26
- Painted events
- 3
- Acts and bosses
- 2
- Classes so far
Reviewed
Someone else's opinion.
Scrapfit is one of the five games in Reviewing 5 AI-Made Indie Games #3 by Department of Slop.
Pressing play loads the video from YouTube.
Come break it.
An early demo: two classes, three full acts. It plays in desktop and phone browsers, and your run saves as you go. Tell me where you died.
Enemy, event and menu paintings were made with AI image generation, then cut up and rigged for the game.
About
One person, wandering.
Stray Dream Arts is Jillis ter Hove. I think of myself as a bit of a stray, and I think dreams and games are alike: both have rules you follow without asking why.
I like to make things that don't explain themselves but hold together on their own terms. The rules of a game should be clear. The world it happens in doesn't owe anyone an answer.
Taste
What I play when I'm not making.
Scrapfit plays like Slay the Spire and loots like Path of Exile. That isn't a pitch so much as a confession: it is what my Steam library looks like.
Hours on Steam · the top ten
- Path of Exile2,019 h
- RimWorld927 h
- The Lord of the Rings Online573 h
- Path of Exile 2516 h
- Grim Dawn465 h
- Magic: The Gathering Arena458 h
- Last Epoch328 h
- Baldur's Gate 3247 h
- Slay the Spire167 h
- Cyberpunk 2077144 h
Roughly 3,900 of my Steam hours went into loot-driven action RPGs, and over 800 into card games.
Admired
- CapeBruno Dias, 2015. A superhero origin story told in hypertext, about thirty thousand words long.
- A Dark RoomMichael Townsend, 2013. Begins with a fire in a dark room and never tells you what it is about to become.
At the table
- Magic: The Gathering, CommanderA hundred cards, no two alike, one legendary creature in charge. A deck is a self-portrait.
- Dragon EclipseAwaken Realms. A creature-collecting campaign for one or two.
- Sovereign: Fall of WormwoodA tactical card game of far-future factions.
- Lands of GalzyrSnowdale Design. A storybook of a board game that remembers what you did last time.
Reading
- The Final EmpireBrandon Sanderson
- The Long EarthTerry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
- The Mercy of GodsJames S.A. Corey
Before Scrapfit · 2012 to now
Most dreams wander off.
These are the ones that left something behind: jam games, mods, a teaching game. Two of them still run in the browser.
