Shattered 2 Build ec3fca3 is a preview of the planned major update to Shattered 2. It’s a work in progress, but showcases a few new things and adds some new content which is in a playable, if sometimes rough and very untested, state. This is primarily released for Improve My Game Jam 25, although since the update may end up delayed for real-life reasons this build serves as a teaser of sorts as well, a glimpse of what is eventually to come.

A brief introduction

Or, what is Shattered 2, anyway?

This is mostly for people coming here from the Improve My Game Jam. If you’re coming in from the Magical Girl Game Jam discord you probably already know what this is about and maybe even know what’s coming in this update.

Shattered 2 – The Promise is the sequel to Shattered, a janky little game I made for the first Magical Girl Game Jam back in the dark days of 2020. I’ve described it varyingly as an action adventure, an RPG-lite, or a first-person slasher. Like its predecessor, it mixes high fantasy and medieval realism in a retro-style 2.5D world, but this time around, it’s an open world, plus a whole host of other improvements.

I won’t go into the development history of Shattered 2 too much, there’s already a long writeup about that in another devlog, but the long and short of it is that it was rough and involved both massive scope creep and aggressive requirements scrubbing to counter that scope creep.

The plan, overall, for The Update (it doesn’t have a name, and I’m not sure if it’ll wind up being 2.1.x or 3.0.0 so it’s just The Update), is to add in a lot of the things that had to be cut the first time around. Not all of them, maybe not even most of them, but some of them. The focus is on fleshing out the world through more sidequests, another little area, some background details and collectibles. That’s what I felt was missing the most in the first release, and I think it’s important to explain the world a bit before we go deeper into the lore in Shattered 3.

In the interest of full disclosure and to give an idea of the timeline, I’ve been working on this on and off (but mostly on) since late December 2022. The only things that were really completed within the last week were the Blacksmith sidequest and re-adding the secret level. There are spoilers ahead. It’s recommended that you skip to the conclusion if you want to avoid those.

What got done

Core Upgrade

As a matter of course, Shattered 2 has been upgraded to Unity 2020.3.43f1 and CommonCore 4.1.1. This doesn’t really mean anything for the game itself, other than maybe some bugfixes. There’s a warning that pops up when you try to load an old save now (introduced in CommonCore 4.1.0). That’s all I can think of.

Collectibles

I think this is the only real feature addition as opposed to new content built on existing functionality. There are certain things in the world that can be interacted with, and when interacted with will show a text blurb or picture. Once seen, the state of this is preserved both inside and outside a game session, and unlocked collectibles can be viewed from the menu. The system actually supports audio logs, too, but those won’t be used in this project. This will be used for a lot of the worldbuilding background detail stuff that was missing in the first release.

More stat upgrades

In addition to the existing strength and armour upgrades, there are now speed/agility, attack speed, and endurance upgrades. The new upgrades will be unlocked via the new sidequests. I’ll admit that doesn’t entirely make sense narratively, but because the game is an RPG-lite without item shops or level-based progression, it was about the only option for useful quest rewards.

UI improvements

The new stat upgrades are shown along with the old ones on the status screen. And… actually, I think that’s it for UI improvements. But hey, it’s something!

Temple worldspace

There’s one new worldspace in the update, which is the Temple you couldn’t go into in the first version. This serves a role in some of the sidequests, but is also a place where some of the lore can be explored. The religion of the setting was defined before, but there was nowhere to really present it to the player before. Now you’ll be able to talk to the Priest and read some flavour text beside a statue of each of the four deities.

Priest sidequest

This is the first sidequest I fleshed out when starting to define the content for the update. You have to pick up a package for the Priest, the contents of which he’s being somewhat evasive about. I knew I wanted to involve the Temple and the Priest and wanted to keep scope small, with no new worldspaces and only a few interactions. It’s a relatively short quest, but has more than one path to completion which may not be obvious at first. I won’t say it’s the best sidequest ever, but I think it turned out well and it went together quickly.

Blacksmith sidequest

This was the third sidequest conceived, but the second implemented. It’s a very simple go to point A and clear out the enemies quest, and in fact that’s lampshaded in dialogue. I could try to justify it with something fancy sounding about meta ludonarrative dissonance but to be honest I’m still trying to keep scope under control and wanted to do something simple for once. I think the conversations with the Blacksmith that start and end the quest are going to be more significant for the player than the quest itself.

Alternate path for Berton quest

Since there’s now an interior worldspace for the Temple, and there’s now a Priest you can talk to, it’s now possible to finish the last part of the Berton questline (dealing with the Rogues Guild) by threatening/blackmailing the Priest. Is this a more moral solution to the problem? That’s up to you to decide.

Killable NPCs

I love games that let you murder everyone. Not because I’m a sociopath- I rarely take that option- but because of the freedom that represents. The game designers, rather than restricting the critical path, have opened things up, doing more of a soft push along the intended path and letting you go wild and reap the consequences. In the initial release of Shattered 2, it was possible to murder everyone unimportant. With the update, you’ll be able to murder almost everyone. The only exceptions are NPCs needed for the main quest, who are protected until they are no longer needed. Sidequest-critical NPCs can be killed and doing so will fail that sidequest.

Secret level

Shattered 2 was built right on top of A Dream of Valhalla, which was my submission to Magical Girl Game Jam 3 and served as a mechanics test for Shattered 2. I remembered last week that this level was never actually removed, so I decided to hook it up to the secret door added elsewhere (which I was really at a loss of what to do with) and see what happened. It, surprisingly, mostly worked, and only needed a few tweaks to skip the “ship” interludes that existed in ADoV and send you back to the right scene at the end. It’s not quite the same as it was; the music and some of the assets were removed so it reuses other tracks and is missing a few details, but for the most part it plays like ADoV with slightly updated mechanics.

What's still left

Wife sidequest

Not your wife, someone else’s wife. It’s just called SideQuestWife in the code, I’ll come up with a better name later. This one is mostly concepted out but I haven’t started building it yet. Like the other sidequests, it mostly involves new NPCs but also potentially involves an existing one as well. It’s a sort of jilted lovers story, with a twist or two along the way.

Background worldbuilding

This includes more collectibles but isn’t just more collectibles. It’s also adding some flavour decorations like maps and signs, and maybe a few tidbits into conversations that hint at aspects of the world we don’t see directly. This is going to involve a lot of art assets and will probably be pretty time consuming, but all the technical work I can think of has already been done.

Achievements (stretch goal)

It would be really nice to have achievements in this game. These will hopefully push the player to explore a bit and try to find some of the less obvious paths. I’ve implemented achievements before and (at least in theory) that module should still work, so I’m not too worried about the technical side, although it would be nice to add proper notifications which we didn’t have before. It’s going to simply come down to whether I have the time to implement the calls, draw the hint images, and debug everything.

Final polish

Of course, before every release there’s a list a mile long of small things to do after everything is seemingly done. The main menu and credits sequence need some tweaks, the README probably needs another round of cleanup, and everything needs to be tested all over again. That’s the stuff I can think of, I’m sure there’s more. Just testing the game a bit for this preview release I’ve already found stuff I want to tweak.

Closing remarks

I’d planned a significant content update to Shattered 2 before it had even released. Although it’s not going to bring back everything that was cut during development, it will shore up some of the weaker points in the game and add a lot more depth to the world. Over the past month and a half, I’ve added a new worldspace, several NPCs, a sidequest, a collectibles system, and new stat upgrades. Over the past week or so, I’ve added another sidequest (albeit a shorter one) and brought back the core of A Dream Of Valhalla as a bonus level.

That update isn’t here yet. That isn’t this.

This, Build ec3fca3, is a work-in-progress preview. I’d say it’s about 70% there. Most of the bones are in, along with a good chunk of the content, but there’s still a lot left to do. I was hoping for a February release, but unfortunately because of other circumstances it could take a lot longer than that. So, for now, you can give this preview a try.