Last year, I announced Shattered 3 was formally cancelled. Since then, I’ve occasionally made statements to the contrary. What’s going on? Is it still in the pipeline?

The short answer is “maybe”, but here’s the whole story.

A Brief Recap

Shattered was my entry to the very first Magical Girl Game Jam, back in the dark days of 2020. It was intended to be a visual novel in the magical girl genre (natch).

The actual result is neither a visual novel nor in the magical girl genre, because I had no idea what either of those were at the time (and kinda still don’t). The gameplay is my standard retro-ish first person shooter slasher plus dialogue trees. The storyline is half my frustrations at the world of Ice and Fire, half basic superhero origin story. But hey, the protagonist has a magic sword! It was meant to be influenced by Delain and symphonic/gothic metal in general, but vanishingly little of this made it into the final game.

An aside: Rereading the devlog, man I had a lot more energy back then (and also a lot more naivete).

The sequel began as a rejected concept for the first game, but by the time I actually started working on it I was already imagining the series as a trilogy or quadrilogy. I had a ton of ideas to sort through. I wanted to start planting the seeds of the next entry in Shattered 2, but between those being not quite figured out yet and that game’s own tumultuous development process, not much made it in (though a little more was added post-release).

I won’t rehash what a mess that was (there’s a detailed postmortem already), but the bottom line was that I learned the hard way that I didn’t want to a project with that kind of scope anymore- if I ever really did.

Changing Plans

Despite its many flaws, I felt satisfied with Shattered 2- and more than a little hesitant to take on such a large project again. After it was released, I mostly stuck with game jams, side projects, and updates to existing releases rather than jumping into the threequel or another big game. Nonetheless, I had wanted to get back to Shattered 3 eventually. By that point it was firmly planned as a trilogy with a possible coda, and I was excited for the story and how it would follow on from the last two games.

In 2023 and 2024, I started winding down my game dev efforts. Frankly, I had reached a point in my life where I wanted to spend the majority of my time and energy elsewhere. At that point I still had both Shattered 3 and the then-untitled third Outliers game on the horizon and figured I could kind of end with those as capstones. I decided to tackle the latter first- partially because it was the easier of the two- and it was released as By The Meridiem Gleam in late 2024.

I did poke at Shattered 3 a bit in 2023 and 2024, getting as far as a prototype of a battle system and a work in progress intro cutscene. After Meridiem, though, I’ve been pretty much burnt out on game dev, and I’ve barely been able to get back into small, short projects. Every time I’ve thought about jumping back into Shattered 3 it comes with a feeling of dread, and because of that I decided to close the book and move the project to cancelled.

Side Note: Content Generated

I experimented with using generative AI for Shattered 3, and the public demo did contain some AI-generated graphics. When I started, generative AI was less controversial and seemed more promising, though even then I had my personal misgivings. The project never got far enough along to make a decision on whether to use AI or not, and ultimately, I did end up releasing a version of the demo with the AI content replaced.

Reopening The Book

It took me almost a year, but in February I finally finished my playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3. I cried after the finale and again when the credits rolled- even after a hundred plus hours, I was not ready to leave this world behind. It is one of the best games I have ever played, has rocketed to near the top of my list of all-time favourites, and was a breathtaking example of what a video game can be. Being reminded of that, after a string of experiences I was hyped up for and let down by, was truly inspiring. It almost made me want to pick up Shattered 3 again, and do it right.

The key word is almost.

Making Shattered 2 was a miserable, stressful experience that I never want to repeat. It gets worse, though, because a Shattered 3 with everything I want in it would be more akin to Ascension III, a project which I spent five years intensely working on before shelving as unfeasible, during a time in my life where game dev was basically all I had going on.

At the same time, I really do want Shattered 3 to be a thing. It’s a story I want to tell, and it’s what I’ve been building up to from the beginning of the series. I’ve been sitting with these conflicted feelings for a while now and I haven’t been able to put the idea aside.

I’m now leaning toward Shattered 3 being a thing again. I don’t know what it’s going to look like. I don’t know how it’s going to play. And it won’t land before 2029 at the earliest. I’m still very much in the gathering inspiration phase, not even really the planning phase. I do think it’s going to be a major departure from the first two games. Maybe by the end of this year it’ll take shape a bit more and I’ll be able to talk about it in a bit more detail.