Custom Decals - Put Your Own Art on the Helicopter
You can now drop your own images into the game as decals. Slap them on your helicopter, or let them show up right as everything goes wrong (and in Scouts Out, everything goes wrong eventually). However you use it, this run is now yours in a way it wasn't before.
This is two updates in one. If you've been playing since launch you're jumping straight from 1.0.2 to 1.2.1, so you're getting the decal system, a visual overhaul, and a difficulty rebalance that changes how a run actually feels.
Fly Your Own Colors: Custom Decals
No config files, no setup. Drop any PNG or JPG into the game's decal folder and it turns up in the menu, named after your file.
To find the folder: right-click Scouts Out in your Steam library, then Manage > Browse local files, then open ScoutsOut_Data > StreamingAssets > Mods > Decals
Auto-scaling. A 128px icon and a 4096px masterpiece render at the same size, aspect ratio preserved. Nothing to tune.
It sticks around. Your decal flies with you, shows up as a watermark on the game-over summary,
The Difficulty Pass
Scouts Out was too easy, and the reason turned out to be arithmetic rather than design, damage was scaled so small against your health pool that a run basically never left full health. This release rebuilds that from the ground up.
If you've played before, this is the change you'll feel first.
Damage rebalanced across the board. Every weapon, drone and collision now costs a meaningful share of your health. A run ends in a handful of solid hits rather than a few hundred grazes.
Incoming damage ramps with the run. The round that grazes you in the opening minute is a serious threat once you're up to speed.
Health regenerates between engagements. Stay out of fire for a few seconds and you recover - but only to the top of your current quarter of the health bar. Damage is never fully undone without a pickup.
Deep runs become a war of attrition. The further you go, the lower your recovery ceiling.
Brief invulnerability after a hit, so drone bursts and ground scrapes can't chain-kill you in a single contact.
Drones knock you off course and degrade your handling for a moment afterwards. Getting clipped costs you control, not just health.
Health pickups scale to how hurt you are - modest at near-full, a lifeline when critical, and the only way back above your recovery ceiling.
No more drop droughts. The longer you go without a drop, the likelier the next kill is to produce one.
A Fresh Coat of Paint
Building depth shading. A new lit building shader derives beveled edge lighting from the sprite silhouette, and every building now lights consistently, some were previously on an unlit shader and couldn't receive light at all.
Refined lighting. Bloom retuned to keep the neon glow on signage without washing out the frame. Pale static light artifacts over the sky and buildings are gone. Depth of field disabled, it was blurring by depth in a 2D game.
Map work. New art and layout passes, including a fix to the Soviet map.
Smoother Flying, Fiercer Competition
No more corner wedging. Your craft is now held inside the play area directly instead of being pinned against physics walls, which is what let it wedge where two of them met.
Speed-based camera zoom actually works. It used to jump to maximum zoom on the first frame and stay there. It now widens smoothly as your speed builds.
Leaderboards overhauled. Board switching works, the list scrolls, long pilot names no longer overlap avatars, and scores are right-aligned.
30% off this week
Scouts Out is 30% off - $4.89, down from $6.99 - running through Friday 28 August.
We're six reviews away from having a score at all
Steam doesn't show a review score until a game has 10 reviews. We're sitting at four, which means anyone landing on the page right now sees no rating whatsoever. If you've got a few runs in, a review genuinely moves the needle for us more than almost anything else - good, bad, or "I screamed once and uninstalled." We read every one.
Developer note: thank you to everyone who reported the corner-wedging and leaderboard bugs - both are fixed in this build because you flagged them. Keep the feedback coming in the community hub, and we'll see you in the skies.