Scam Artist - Prototype
Build your empire of scamming in this idle building game. Place down slot machines that never pay out, sell trading card packs that never have any hits and slowly build up your riches to upgrade your apartment until it looks like the most professional scam operation ever!
Place down structures that empty out the wallets of your customers!
There are tons of different ways to scam a person - and you are not afraid to use them all at once. Be it rigged slot machines, wheels of fortune that never win or empty trading card packs - your cunning knows no bounds and your customers will happily stroll left to right in your apartment to empty out their pockets.
Started from the bottom, now we're here!
Your shady business starts in your moldy, small apartment. Tough times never last, only tough people last! With time, you'll be able add more rooms, upgrade the interior and, with it, gain a lot more money as customers stream in!
Decorations are not just for looksies!
Each decoration has an effect that dramatically increases your growth as a scammer or just quadruples your cheddar. Be it dozens of eviction notes crammed into one corner or a luxurious chandelier hanging from the ceiling - find a layout that ultimately makes you richer and looks cool at the same time! ... or only just richer, you do you.
Join the organization!
The secret "Scam Society" may eventually take notice of your exploits and invite you into its ranks. Trade passports, credit cards, and fake IDs for research points to unlock even more elaborate ways of scamming your unsuspecting customers.
Full touch support!
This game utilizes drag and drop for interaction and can be played with only your mouse! On steam deck or mobile, you can even play the game completely using only the touch controls. This game was made with both desktop and mobile consoles and platforms in mind.
Controls
You can drag and drop stuff to place it down. Nothing may overlap.
When you HOLD onto something you placed, you can rearrange it.
You can move the camera by dragging around the mouse while holding
(On mobile you need to use two fingers)
Credits:
Game by greenpixels
Art by me and my wife
Soundeffects from zapsplat
Music is
Electric Funk Loop - Tini Composer
Feel The Groove - Composer Squad
Feeling Funky - Composer Squad
Funky Alien - Craig Dodge
In The Groove - Composer Squad
Rythm of Life - Composer Squad
Fonts are:
'Buzzer by somepx' for titles, labels and so on
'Nocive by somepx' for long-running text like dialog and item descriptions
'Source Han Sans CN Heavy' as asian fallback
[incrementaldb_verification: greenpixels]
Download
Development log
Comments
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I love the game! It's awesome!
will you be adding this to consoles at some point? I really enjoyed the game!
Addicting game!
Pretty fun game!!
Thank you!
Really awesome game! Couldn't finish it cause I had no more room to put the statue. Wish there was a button to delete stuff, even if it gave me no refunds, but that could go to the full game. Great job! Wishlisting it for sure :D
I should probably include that in the tutorial text, but when you re-arrange an item (by holding it) there is a trash can in the lower right. Drag it onto that trash can to delete it.
tip: long numbers hard to read use:
2000000 = 20m
Good point, will change that.
Absolutely loved this game. I can't wait for the full version to come out, because I will definitely play it. I'm soooo looking forward to getting some sweet, sweet revenge on the Landlord.
Will the full release be available on Mac as well, or just Linux and Windows?
I had planned for only linux and windows ... but so many people keep requesting it, I may consider it.
Really glad you enjoyed the game!
Game is pretty fun! Only bug I noticed was sometimes if you go to rearrange one of the games and then cancel it, the customers go behind it and don't use it, took me a moment to realise I wasn't making as much as I should've for what I had placed! It's a very chill game and progression feels decently paced, you're not super OP right away, though you do quickly amass quite the fortune and some of the milestones are a bit too spread apart, slightly imbalanced in that regard.
Thanks for the heads up! Glad you enjoyed it.
I love the game! Hope it'll be mac compatible when it comes out, also I got every item in the game.
I'll look into it. Developing for Mac is, to be honest, somewhat annoying and expensive due to certificates and running fees haha
Cool concept! If you don't mind me asking, what is the font, and is it public license? I really like it.
Thanks! Fonts used are:
'Buzzer by somepx' for titles, labels and so on
'Nocive by somepx' for long-running text like dialog and item descriptions
'Source Han Sans CN Heavy' as asian fallback
Will add them to the credits, thanks for the reminder
I have a question. the decoracion affect all the building of only the room that is the decoracion?
They affect all rooms
My tiniest of gripes is 4 in roman numerals is IV and not IIII.
Other than that, this was fun and easy. I would maybe like to see some sort of stats tracker either over all or above each room to know how much I am making in each room. I struggle in games where the goal is to min max different areas, so not knowing if I am getting the most that I can in each room was an issue for me.
All in all great game!
IIII is a pretty common alternative on clocks.
I believe the most popular theory is because IV is similar to the first two letters of Jupiter (IVpiter), the Romans found it offensive or something
pretty cool, but idk how far it can evolve beyond just pixel-hunting for placements. Some notes:
gl
AMAZING!!!
Thank you!
Good game!
Thanks, glad you like it!
the late progression is a bit slow, i think it needs unlimited rooms and not buy limit too, why i cant have 50 rooms full of slot machines? also needs an auto collect for the money
Hey, thanks for playing! The full release will have a way to automatically collect the money.
The Chinese translation has a mid-sentence font change issue. it's unreadable
Thanks for letting me know, I'll try to fix that.
Hey, could you check again? I tried using a different font that hopefully should fix this issue. Thanks again for letting me know.
the font change issue is fixed, but few chinese characters won't properly display (these 2014 squares), probably because the chosen font doesn't support enough chinese characters
Uff that is a bummer. Especially because the font was supposed to be specifically support Chinese. Super hard to find a good fallback font as a non-native speaker. I'll see what I can do, thanks for updating me!
absolutely loved this and cant wait for the full release, i had one bug when i played where i could place a decoration behind a different one and if i clicked the decoration it would disappear but it only happened twice. other than that its great so far and can't wait to buy it off steam when it comes out
Thanks! I'll try to get to the bottom of that bug.
Fun but crashes a lot when placing objects. Win11/Firefox. Here's the console errors, hope it helps.
Referrer Policy: Ignoring the less restricted referrer policy “no-referrer-when-downgrade” for the cross-site request: https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-36R7NPBMLS js
Request for font "Lato" blocked at visibility level 2 (requires 3)
4 lib.min.js:2:52356
Feature Policy: Skipping unsupported feature name “autoplay”. lib.min.js:2:39221
Feature Policy: Skipping unsupported feature name “midi”. lib.min.js:2:39221
Feature Policy: Skipping unsupported feature name “monetization”. lib.min.js:2:39221
Feature Policy: Skipping unsupported feature name “xr-spatial-tracking”. lib.min.js:2:39221
Feature Policy: Skipping unsupported feature name “gyroscope”. lib.min.js:2:39221
Feature Policy: Skipping unsupported feature name “accelerometer”. lib.min.js:2:39221
Feature Policy: Skipping unsupported feature name “xr”. lib.min.js:2:39221
Feature Policy: Skipping unsupported feature name “cross-origin-isolated”. lib.min.js:2:39221
Feature Policy: Skipping unsupported feature name “autoplay”. lib.min.js:2:50993
Feature Policy: Skipping unsupported feature name “midi”. lib.min.js:2:50993
Feature Policy: Skipping unsupported feature name “monetization”. lib.min.js:2:50993
Feature Policy: Skipping unsupported feature name “xr-spatial-tracking”. lib.min.js:2:50993
Feature Policy: Skipping unsupported feature name “gyroscope”. lib.min.js:2:50993
Feature Policy: Skipping unsupported feature name “accelerometer”. lib.min.js:2:50993
Feature Policy: Skipping unsupported feature name “xr”. lib.min.js:2:50993
Feature Policy: Skipping unsupported feature name “cross-origin-isolated”. lib.min.js:2:50993
Partitioned cookie or storage access was provided to “https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/18628317/web/index.html?v=1785574627” because it is loaded in the third-party context and dynamic state partitioning is enabled. injected.js:1:14200
The WebAssembly exception handling 'try' instruction is deprecated and should no longer be used. Please recompile to use the 'try_table' instruction instead.
Godot Engine v4.7.1.stable.double.custom_build.a13da4feb (2026-07-13 21:00:28 UTC) - https://godotengine.org index.js:452:16
Request for fullscreen was denied because Element.requestFullscreen() was not called from inside a short running user-generated event handler. index.js:1:165409
OpenGL API OpenGL ES 3.0 (WebGL 2.0) - Compatibility - Using Device: Mozilla - ANGLE (AMD, Radeon R9 200 Series Direct3D11 vs_5_0 ps_5_0), or similar index.js:452:16
Build configuration: Emscripten 4.0.20, single-threaded, no GDExtension support. index.js:452:16
ERROR: Attempt to open script 'res://addons/limbo_console/limbo_console.gd' resulted in error 'File not found'. index.js:467:18
at: load_source_code (modules/gdscript/gdscript.cpp:1139) index.js:467:18
ERROR: Failed loading resource: res://addons/limbo_console/limbo_console.gd. index.js:467:18
at: _load (core/io/resource_loader.cpp:317) index.js:467:18
ERROR: Failed to instantiate an autoload, can't load from path: res://addons/limbo_console/limbo_console.gd. index.js:467:18
at: start (main/main.cpp:4382) index.js:467:18
[Placement] FAIL: overlaps placed placeable '@Node2D@88' index.js:452:16
[Placement] FAIL: no hovered room area (type=0) index.js:452:16
Uncaught RuntimeError: index out of bounds
callUserCallback https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/18628317/web/index.js:1
runIter https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/18628317/web/index.js:1
MainLoop_runner https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/18628317/web/index.js:1
<anonymous> source20:246541
<anonymous> source20:251826
<anonymous> source20:14494792
<anonymous> source20:254793
<anonymous> source20:4651217
<anonymous> source20:366834
<anonymous> source20:18379588
<anonymous> source20:1420368
<anonymous> source20:18379574
<anonymous> source20:18377593
<anonymous> source20:465171
<anonymous> source20:13863321
<anonymous> source20:399310
<anonymous> source20:13862731
<anonymous> source20:15375016
<anonymous> source20:7392691
<anonymous> source20:7397093
callUserCallback https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/18628317/web/index.js:1
runIter https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/18628317/web/index.js:1
MainLoop_runner https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/18628317/web/index.js:1
Glad you like it - sorry about the crashes, I'll investigate.
Some gameplay, some critique ;)
(Also, to other video makers, the music is copyrighted, so turn it off :P )
Great, polished prototype, love the overall style and the cover artwork, also so writing. Possible improvements: Placing items/deco and understanding where placing is possible and how the "collision box" works is difficult and not very intuitive. I am not sure if I have to place deko in the same room as items to affect them and I don't see a way to validate my assumptions. I assume "renovation" affects only items in that room, but deko affact everything?
As far as I can tell, all of the deco affects, including renovations, affects all of the rooms.
great game
Thanks!
great idea, but dont forget about gamblers table, its a great game, sorry for off-topic, also had issues with drag and drop feature, you should add reminder or something like that, have a nice one!
Cant seem to buy anything right after the intro, all a click does is bring up the description.
Hey, to buy you need to drag and drop. Does that work for you?