Scartown screenshots

Your character, and what it is holding

The page you open on. Four bars across the top, and all four are a clock rather than a score: energy fills on its own and the gym spends it, action points pay for crime, hit points come back after somebody puts you down, and happiness is what decides whether an hour at the gym was worth anything.

Under them is the last site you ran, with what you walked out with and how many times you have cleared it, and under that the contracts you are carrying. Nothing here is a daily chore with a tick box: every line is a thing you chose.

Four kinds of crime, four separate skills

Con games pay the best and jail you the longest. Burglary is the steadiest. Robbery usually leaves you holding something the Workshop can use. Surveillance pays a little less and almost never puts you in a cell.

Each group keeps its own skill, and the number beside a job is a real check rather than a promise. Meeting it still leaves you failing often enough to notice, and the odds are never printed. Working them out is part of the job.

The gym, and the attributes you cannot buy

Four battle attributes trained with energy, and the equipment gets better as you put the hours in. Three things multiply what an hour is worth: your endurance, how happy you are, and where you live, because an address carries its own training bonus and the property ladder runs a long way up.

The row underneath is the half of your character no gym sells. Endurance comes from every floor of a mission walked out of, intelligence from every check you pass, reputation from every boss you put down.

The University, studied rather than bought

Four trades, and enrolling in one is free. Studying builds a grade, the grade is your chance of passing the test, and failing costs grade rather than the hours you put in. Six hours in a day and the day turns over at midnight.

Every rank is a flat one percent, and they are the quiet kind: more likely to hit with what you are holding, harder to be hit at all, or less damage taken from everything. Grit at rank ten halves the hospital time when a mission goes wrong.

Work that does not involve hurting anyone

A fresh board once a day and three jobs at a time. Complete twelve missions, win five attacks against people near your level, hospitalise three, do three jobs at the Workshop. They pay cash and experience and they build work experience, which nothing else in the city does.

Carrying one costs nothing and abandoning one costs nothing but the progress. They are there so an evening has a shape if you want one, and ignorable if you do not.