A little retrospective of Shattered

Sometimes Blake is scared to sleep alone. Luckily for him, he can always count on you.

No hard work today, unfortunately. My regular job has called me to arms. But I don't waste that time in vain, as I'm thinking of future dialogues, browse available assets (mostly clothes), and overall visualising the story structure for the versions yet to come. And I managed to get a lot of stuff done yesterday, so it's all good.

While I have a little break, I want to tell you what was the original concept of Shattered. Why? I don't know, it might be interesting to see how it went from there to what it is now.

The world of the game was pretty much the same from the start. Some nearest future, societal collapse, no laws, and slavery all over the place. You know, pretty basic. My main character (at the time he was nameless, but we can call him Blake as well) was just a regular guy who ran into debt with mafia and naturally had to think of some way out. Well, that way was to marry a middle-aged rich guy (who, surprise-surprise, was basically Melinda in male form) with two children. A son and a daughter. So the whole point of this was to build pseudo-Blake's relationships with his husband, stepchildren, and your mansion's staff while also not being able to go outside because there could be mafia hitmen around.

This concept seemed neat for about a week. After that I realised that everything truly interesting and thrilling happened in the first ten minutes, and after that it would be just diaries of a slut, a constant stream of «Would you want to fuck this character? Y/N», which is boring, pointless, and leads nowhere. There could be some low-sloped arc for the main character, but, I mean, he takes it in the ass while wearing the wedding gown in the third or fourth scene of the game, so it's already peaked. So I decided to pace this thing a little. Change main character's role in the house, add more characters, and just make the premise a little more believable (well… as much as I possibly could). And even after that I had to tweak some things. For example, in the beginning there was no Samuel (his role had to be played by one of the staff members, but eventually I decided that he better not loitering around all the time, so Blake could have some time to contemplate his feelings), Rebecca wasn't Melinda's daughter but rather her lover, and instead of Liam we had an Asian transgirl working as a secretary. This is why he's called Liam, by the way. His (her) first name was Lily. By the way, I've heard people wanting to feminise Liam as well, but that's most likely not going to happen. You can convince him to wear a dress some time, but that's about it. There will be a different character for that role. 

The point of all that is I'm very happy that I took some time to wait and shape my ideas a little better. Because if I started with my early concepts, this game would be a total mess, and I probably would lose interest around this point. Thankfully, that's not the case, as I currently have early drafts for the story for three more versions to come beyond 0.3. And I could have more, but there are some important things that I'll let you decide eventually. 

Well, that's about it for now. I hope you have a good day (or whatever time of the day you have right now), and stay tuned for the updates. I'll show you a couple of already done renders later this week.