Scramble: Battle of Britain

After debuting as a preview in the open beta, the legendary Hawker Hurricane, a pivotal force in the Battle of Britain, has officially landed in the main game as a new playable RAF fighter!

For those who missed our latest update: we introduced a beta branch, accessible to all Early Access players, where we test work-in-progress content before it reaches the core game. The Hurricane was the first feature added there, but the beta will remain open throughout the Early Access journey of the game, with frequent content updates.

Pilots, this is your call to action! Help shape the future of Scramble by sharing your feedback and battle replays. Join our community on Discord to share your experiences with other players and stay informed about upcoming content: https://discord.gg/2hPRMJ6bhU

Before you take off, check out our latest video showcasing the Hurricane’s main features and read a few curiosities about the workhorse of the Battle of Britain.

Read the changelog HERE.

The Hawker Hurricane’s impact on aviation history

The Hawker Hurricane played a critical role in the Battle of Britain, accounting for an impressive 60% of the RAF’s air victories during the conflict. Though the Supermarine Spitfire often steals the spotlight, the Hurricane was the backbone of the Royal Air Force, known for its reliability and combat effectiveness against enemy formations in nearly every major theatre in the Second World War.

Built with a steel-tube fuselage covered in fabric, the Hurricane was able to endure significant damage while remaining operational. Its thick wings allowed for remarkable maneuverability, making it ideal for tight dogfights. This robust construction also made it easier for ground crews to repair, keeping it battle-ready for longer.

Beyond the battlefield, the Hurricane remains a cultural icon, frequently celebrated in historical documentaries and airshows. Its contributions to the RAF’s success have secured its place in aviation history, inspiring generations of war historians and flight enthusiasts.

Tactical Tips for using the Hurricane in Scramble: Battle of Britain

In Scramble: Battle of Britain, the Hurricane is faithfully recreated to reflect its wartime strengths. Its durability and steady gun platform make it perfect for delivering precise strikes against enemy bombers and fighters alike. The aircraft’s exceptional maneuverability gives players the edge in close-quarters combat, holding aim steady in the heat of battle.

While the Spitfire remains famed for its speed and sleek design, the Hurricane excels in resilience and firepower. Its reliability makes it particularly effective against bombers, while the Spitfire’s speed often makes it better suited for interception roles. Your choice of aircraft depends on whether you value durability and sustained firepower or speed and interception tactics.

The addition of the Hawker Hurricane lets you experience first-hand the power and resilience of this legendary aircraft. Take to the skies and see if you can turn the tide of battle, just like the heroes of 1940.

Visit the games official website for game information, or via Steam.

Slitherine Software today announced the release of Squadron Leader Update – v.010.004, exclusively for Early Access users, giving you the opportunity to playtest upcoming content in development. The update is packed with enhancements to the Squadron Leader experience, including improved balance, new Leadership Traits, and detailed progress reports.

This update also features a host of bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements.

Read the full changelog on Steam.

Scramble: Battle of Britain is a tactical dogfighting game set in 1940, featuring intense aerial battles in a 3D airspace. Take control of a squadron of fighters, planning maneuvers, witnessing real-time simulations, and analyzing battle damage with detailed camera tools.

Visit the games official website for game information, on on Steam.

Big News, Aces.

We’ve been thrilled by the positive feedback following the Early Access release of Scramble: Battle of Britain, and we’re excited to share our plans for upcoming content.

The journey to Scramble’s full release will bring many exciting updates, and your feedback will play a vital role in shaping the game. If you haven’t already, we warmly invite you to join our community on Discord to share screenshots, thoughts, and suggestions.

To make this process even more interactive, we’re introducing a beta exclusively for Early Access players. As development progresses, this branch will offer new work-in-progress content for you to explore and test.

Keep your engines warm. The skies are calling, and there’s more action on the horizon.

Slitherine Software’s intense tactical dogfighting title Scramble: Battle of Britain has now soared into Steam Early Access. Set in the chaotic 1940 summer skies, this turn-based strategy game puts players in command of RAF and Luftwaffe squadrons, leading intense aerial battles in a dynamic 3D airspace. Through realistic physics simulations and detailed planning, players will manage pilot traits and plan tactical manoeuvres, with the Early Access version laying the groundwork for a full campaign in the final release.

Watch the Scramble: Battle of Britain Early Access Launch Trailer HERE.

The Early Access version of Scramble offers a Skirmish Generator, allowing players to rapidly create missions and fight as either the RAF or Luftwaffe. The game’s cinematic tools enable players to view the action from multiple angles and share game replays, while a comprehensive single-player mode puts them in the role of an RAF squadron leader to engage in strategic combat missions. Aircraft like the Supermarine Spitfire, Hawker Hurricane, and Messerschmitt 109 are available to pilot in detailed aerial battles.

Watch the Scramble: Battle of Britain Early Access Gameplay Trailer HERE.

Aircraft in Scramble are simulated down to the subcomponent level, allowing for realistic damage and strategic depth. Players can experience the impact of bullets tearing through fuel tanks, engines, and radiators, or face the challenge of handling fatigued and blacked-out pilots. Each mission offers intense, historically accurate combat, while the planning, simulation, and review phases give players full control to manage manoeuvres and analyse battle outcomes in detail.

As Scramble: Battle of Britain enters Early Access, player feedback will be key in shaping its development. The team is committed to open communication, encouraging players to share content, suggestions, and feedback through forums and Discord. Regular updates will incorporate player-driven improvements, with community playtests and livestreams planned to engage directly with players. This collaborative approach will ensure that the final game reflects the needs and desires of the community.

Slitherine Software plans to keep Scramble in Early Access for approximately one year, during which several major updates will be rolled out. These updates will include the full Battle of Britain campaign, additional aircraft, enhanced AI behaviours, and more player-driven features such as multiplayer mode. This will all ensure that the full release delivers a comprehensive and polished experience for all players.

Click here for more game information.

Slitherine is thrilled to announce that Scramble: Battle of Britain will be released in Early Access on October 29th. The game will feature a brand-new “Squadron Leader” game mode, where you will manage a persistent roster of pilots, each with unique traits, and engage in a battle for survival against overwhelming odds.

A “Skirmish” mode is also available, allowing customizable quick matches where you can play as either the RAF or the Luftwaffe.

The game will be launched in Early Access because it introduces a highly innovative gameplay system, and Slitherine believes that it will benefit massively from player feedback. This approach will allow to refine the game through continuous iteration and upgrades, ensuring a truly engaging and polished experience for the full release.

Prepare to master a whole new level of tactical dogfighting, pilots.

Click here for more game information.

Slitherine Games have announced that the major update to the Scramble demo is out now! Grab the demo on the games official Steam page!

Here’s a list of the new features included in this version:

Aircraft

Missions

Gameplay options

UI

In-game

Match replay

Too many bugfixes, balancing tweaks and performance improvements to mention!

Slitherine Games has released the Scramble: Battle of Britain – Flight School, Episode #8 video.

The Scramble engine is built from the ground up to make capturing content from your matches as easy as possible. Every moment of each Scramble match can be scrubbed through with our rewind system, and the action of every Scramble match can be saved to a small replay file that players can share with friends.

Watch Flight School, Episode #8 “Cinematic Tools” video HERE.

Full Match Replays

Scramble matches save as a small text file composed of a scenario definition and the control inputs for every aircraft. After loading a replay file, Scramble will re-simulate its match turn-by-turn with the ability for players to interrupt and take control of any turn. The turn-by-turn simulation and interrupt features are useful for post-match analysis and for exploring alternate tactics. And players have access to the same cinematic toolset and turn/match rewind features during a replay as they normally have in a live dogfight. The Scramble replay system lets players come back to any match at any time and find the perfect screenshot, gif, or video.

Sharing Replays

Match replay files are lightweight and easy to share over the internet; demo players have been sharing match replays in our Discord server since June. If you download a friend’s match replay file you can relive their favorite matches in the Scramble engine from your own PC, you can act as a film director and capture footage of their successes and failures, and you can interrupt and control their aircraft yourself on any turn to fix their errors or challenge their scores.

Cinematic Toolset

The rewind and scrubbable nature of Scramble gameplay makes it perfect for staging screenshots, gifs, and video. Our already robust cinematic toolset will continue expanding throughout the life of the Scramble engine, and below is a list of some of the features that will be available at launch.

Scramble currently features a free camera for movement around the sky, a dolly camera that will travel at an offset relative to the selected airplane, and a hardpoint camera with a list of preset camera positions for each aircraft. Scramble gameplay can also be viewed from our tactical mode, where the action unfolds in isometric perspective like a diorama and the player can move a cursor around the sky to investigate detailed information about different airplanes.

The Scramble camera allows positional and orientation control both in world space and in reference to a selected object, and camera orientation can be defined relative to the horizon or relative to the roll angle of the selected airplane. The camera allows players to smoothly adjust field of view for zoom and the camera can remember preferred zoom levels in different camera modes.

The Scramble camera can be commanded to track a selected airplane or a target aircraft in any of its major modes. And players can toggle UI layers on and off including both the 2D HUD and the 3D worldspace UI.

Thank you for sticking with us! For now, Flight School stops here. We’ve truly enjoyed training our pilots by sharing the features and development phases of Scramble, and we encourage you to continue giving your feedback on the demo to help us implement enhancements in the game.

Click here for more game information.

Slitherine Games has released the Scramble: Battle of Britain – Flight School, Episode #7 video.

Flight school is back with another advanced topic today, designed to help Scramble pilots master their skills and excel in dogfighting.

Watch Flight School, Episode #7 “Energy Fighting” video HERE.

Airspeed and Aerodynamic Control

Since the middle of the First World War, fighter aircraft have employed guns fixed to their airframes, and a pilot must orient their entire aircraft to bring these guns to bear on a target. Aircraft generally orient themselves through aerodynamic control – the manipulation of the surfaces or shape of a body as air moves around it to inspire forces and moments to act on that body. We define the rate and quality of this air moving around a body as “airspeed” and, regardless of the aerodynamic design of an aircraft or the qualities of the air moving around it, the laws of physics demand that some energy be transferred between aircraft and air, that the energy differential between them be lessened, and thus that every instance of aerodynamic control and every resulting maneuver incur a cost in energy that is mostly paid through airspeed.

Read more HERE.

Slitherine Games has released the Scramble: Battle of Britain – Flight School, Episode #6 video.

Watch Flight School, Episode #6 “Dogfighting and damage modeling” HERE.

Welcome back to Flight School, our dev diary series unveiling the most important elements of Scramble: Battle of Britain step by step. Today, we are introducing an advanced topic to help our demo pilots train their skills as the game takes its best shape.

Dogfighting and Damage Modeling
Aerial gunnery is a challenging skill to master in real-time, even with a pilot’s ability to constantly adjust their orientation to maintain a target within their gunsight. The turn-based design of Scramble further complicates this problem by locking aircraft controls for seconds at a time, limiting player authority to minimize targeting errors. Consequently, the Scramble Engine makes some simplifying assumptions to abstract gunnery in a way that rewards traditional dogfighting tactics while still leveraging the analog simulation pillar of Scramble’s design.

Projectiles & Damage
Scramble represents projectiles as clusters: each cluster simulates along a ballistic trajectory and has a base damage value that adjusts according to impact velocity and distance traveled. While aircraft guns in the real world are tuned to converge at a point in space in front of the airplane, yielding a very narrow 3D hit box hundreds of meters along their trajectories, Scramble simulates a more generous damage region that universally expands as projectiles fly farther along their ballistic paths. This expanded hit region allows Scramble to both maintain its simulation foundation while rewarding tactical foresight.

Every projectile in Scramble carries a structure of data representing the active pilot traits at its time of firing, so upon impact the base bullet damage can be increased or reduced according to the pilot traits.

Scramble aircraft are modeled down to the subsystem level, with the entire body of an aircraft split into small hit spheres that are assigned to the subsystem who most closely shares their position. Subsystems can be marked as dense or penetrable, so the skin of a wing or fuselage will allow a projectile to continue its trajectory, possibly impacting a more dense subsystem in an ensuing simulation frame.

Subsystem Damage & Failure
Every subsystem on a Scramble aircraft has a total health value, critical damage threshold, performance impact while critically damaged and while failed, and a potential list of other subsystem components that either feed it or rely on its functioning for their own performance.

As an example of coupled subsystems, engines require fuel to run and radiators to remain healthy. A failed radiator will immediately move engine damage status to critical. A critically damaged engine has reduced thrust output and can only continue to survive at a reduced throttle state.

Control surfaces and structural subsystems will degrade aerodynamic stability and performance when critically damaged or failed. Damaged ailerons impact aircraft roll performance, and damaged elevators will limit pitch authority and may induce roll and yaw biases. Critically damaged control surfaces may fail completely when commanded during high-G maneuvers, so players should be careful to minimize maneuvering along damaged control axes while at high speeds.

Leaks, Fires & Explosions
Most aircraft in Scramble have both oil and coolant radiators. Damaged oil and coolant systems will leak black and white smoke, respectively, at a rate proportional to the damage they have accrued. Fully failed radiator systems will damage the engines they feed, so subsystem failures tend to cascade into engine failures as dogfights drag on.

Fuel tanks are positioned and sized according to historical references, and punctured fuel tanks will leak for the duration of a dogfight. Fuel leaks can catch on fire, and empty fuel tanks receiving additional damage will result in a catastrophic explosion.

Debris
Every component that falls off an airplane in Scramble contains unique aerodynamics and damage definitions, and will continue simulating until impacting the sea. Aircraft can collide with visual debris and will receive damage proportional to the debris size and closing velocity.

An aircraft that loses its right wing will begin to roll aggressively to the right side while its heavy wing flutters behind on its own simulated trajectory. If this same aircraft then loses its left wing, the rightward roll will dampen, and the body will continue on a mostly ballistic trajectory until impact.

Close-range shots are the most sure method of inflicting damage in Scramble, but heavily damaged aircraft tend to leave a wake littered with dangerous debris. Pilots attacking at close-range should plan ahead to ensure they exit the engagement clear of any resulting debris field.

Live to Fight Again
Scramble aircraft degrade and fail bit by bit, with coupled subcomponents and plenty of feedback to help players manage the risk of keeping their pilots in the fight for additional turns. The most valuable resource in Scramble is a pool of healthy, experienced pilots, and players will find that leaving combat to fight another day is a far higher rewarded strategy than maximizing kills. Our goal in developing this richly simulated combat engine is to facilitate player stories that mirror the emotional and tactical richness of pilot memoirs from the Battle of Britain.

Click here for more game information.

Attention, pilots and flight captains!

Prepare for takeoff with Scramble: Battle of Britain.

We’re thrilled to announce that a demo of our exhilarating aerial combat game will be available during the Steam Next Fest from June 10th to17th. This is your chance to experience intense dogfights and intricate mechanics firsthand.

Here’s what you can look forward to in the demo:

Missions

Simulation

Control

Cinematic Tools

Don’t miss out on this thrilling opportunity to immerse yourself in the skies of WWII. Get ready to Scramble! Click here for more game information.