Strike the Earth! | Shattered Secrets #6

Hey Shattered Supporters!

For this month’s Shattered secrets blog, I’m going to talk about quests designs on Shattered generally and give some early info about what I’m thinking on for a new quest from the troll blacksmith!

Please keep in mind that Shattered Secrets is more about longer-term plans and early concepting. These plans may change significantly or be scrapped entirely, and it may take quite a while for them to show up in game.

What Should go Into a Quest?

So far Shattered has had two quest redesigns, and both of them happened over 6 years ago! A lot has changed about Shattered’s design over the years, so it’s only natural to first question whether the two existing reworked quests are a good template to extrapolate from.

The good news here is I actually had some pretty good foresight when I was adding both of these quests. The ghost quests were heavily focused on tutorial minibosses and the wandmaker quests expanded on this to feature little boss arenas. After that I wanted the quests to continue getting more elaborate, but I realized that I wasn’t in a good position to actually do that 6 years ago, and Shattered was likely to have a long dev lifetime that would give me loads of time to circle back to quests.

I wasn’t expecting it to take 6 years of course, but I’m now in more than a strong enough position to properly redesign the later quests. I want to more heavily expand on the quest-specific room concept from the wandmaker, by having the further quests occupy their own larger areas, perhaps entire bonus levels! Similarly, I’d like for quests to have more unique gameplay, possibly even being full minigames.

As for the ghost and wandmaker quests themselves, I may give them tweaks or expansions at some point, but I think their overall complexity is just about right for when they appear in the game.

Digging for Treasure

For the blacksmith’s quest in particular, I think it makes the most sense to emphasizing the digging mechanic and create a special area for the player to dig for rare ores or gems while avoiding dangers. The area the player enters might have a time limit, or hazards that get increasingly dangerous, and they would be given the ability to mine through walls to find special treasures or bonus rooms. This might be reminiscent of games like motherload, where the ultimate goal is to get as much loot as possible in a limited time.

Such an arena would also create some really interesting levelgen opportunities. There’s no reason why such a level would need distinct rooms, or even for the open spaces to all be connected, so it could have a much more cave-like arena made using perlin noise, or similar. This might even be a good chance to harken back a bit to the more chaotic levels generated by Shattered’s grandfather: Brogue.

So what would the player do with this treasure? My rough idea for improved rewards involves this treasure being a currency that the player can cash in with the blacksmith for various unique services. One of those services will be the usual item combining, but there are all sorts of other things he could offer. I think this is a great way to give players some equipment flexibility features they’ve been asking for (e.g. upgrading an item’s tier maybe?) but in a way that’s suitably difficult to access.

Naturally there’s a lot more to iron out here, and I still don’t have a specific update in mind for a blacksmith overhaul, but it’ll almost certainly be a 1.X.0 update, and I’ll be refining these ideas as we get closer to that.