Alright, enough procrastinating, time for the postmortem. In this one I'll talk about my inspirations and influences and why this game ended up so weird. I'll do one or two more covering my process, what made it in, what didn't, where I might go next, all that good stuff. Obviously these will all contain spoilers so you may want to hold off reading until after you've played through Shattered.
So, I’m not sure if this really counts as a Magical Girl game. I didn’t realize “magical girl” was a well-defined subgenre with specific narrative elements and visual style until about a third of the way through the jam, by which point I was pretty much committed to what I’d started and I decided to finish it as it stands anyway. I figured it would be different if nothing else.
So, I think I definitely missed the mark on making a Magical Girl game.
I have basically no prior familiarity with the Magical Girl genre. I think I might have seen an episode of Powerpuff Girls as a kid and I read a Nanoha fanfic once because I’d confused it for something else (and was myself very confused). I did skim the tropes page for Magical Girl before I started but I guess I didn’t fully understand it until I saw what other people were building and what they were citing as their inspirations. I did eventually realize that it wasn't just about having a female protagonist with magic, but that Magical Girl is a well defined subgenre with specific narrative and stylistic elements. That was halfway through the jam, and after a minor panic moment I said fuck it, I'll just finish this, it'll be different if nothing else. Indeed, after playing some of the other games in the jam, I've noticed a lot of common elements that I don't have in my game at all.
I would say the biggest influences on what became Shattered are Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire, superhero movies and Iron Man in particular, and gothic/symphonic metal. Mostly setting from the first and plot from the second. As for the last, it was more an inspiration early on that faded except for some bits here and there. In terms of gameplay I kind of fell back to what I was comfortable with- Western RPG dialog trees and 90s/early-2000s shooters- but I'll come back to that later.
I joined the jam fairly early and thought, hey, this is different and neat, but I struggled a lot with coming up with a workable concept and basically didn't have anything locked down until the first day of the jam. Which is either a really good thing or a really bad thing depending on how you look at it, I guess.
The suggested narrative themes of “hopes, dreams, friendship, love, and other wonderful stuffs” made me think of the music of one of my favourite bands, Delain. They’re a band from the Netherlands, variously described as gothic metal, symphonic metal, symphonic rock, or hard rock. I was able to see them last year, which was a lot of fun, and they recently put out a new album, Apocalypse & Chill (a disturbingly prophetic title if I've ever heard one). That's kind of where I started with my brainstorming, and where the working title Lucidity came from (it's Delain's first album). Early on I wanted to make something heavily influenced or based on gothic or symphonic metal, but I was never able to figure out what that meant. I think the most noticeable element left in the game is the Brukton house sigil, which is based on the hummingbird Delain stamps on everything.
I quickly figured out a few things I probably wanted to do, but it was very much a list of scattered ideas. Female protagonist with magical powers, obviously. I was thinking she would get her powers unexpectedly, maybe from a dying goddess or a fallen star, and maybe after a tragedy. I was leaning toward a medieval fantasy setting, and maybe our protagonist wanted to be a knight but couldn’t because it’s one of those medieval fantasy settings. I had some vague idea of maybe a magic ring that’s actually worthless because the power was within her all along. Cliched, but uplifting. For gameplay, I was leaning toward a visual novel, because it seemed fitting and I wanted to break my curse of never finishing one. I definitely wanted to do something story-driven, having just finished a gameplay-focused game for another jam.
One of my earliest ideas was to do a game based on the Within Temptation song The Promise. As far as I can tell, it’s about a woman who loses her beloved and then murders a bunch of people avenging him. The name always makes me think of The Witcher but as far as I know it’s not inspired by the Sapkowski book in any way. It would basically be medieval John Wick with a female protagonist and some magic. I scratched this one because it seemed too dark and violent for this jam, and I could never figure out what the gameplay would be. I may come back to it some day.
I also had a really cool idea for a post-game teaser sequence that would flip things on their head, but there was no way to work it into the final plot and I likely wouldn't have had time to make it anyway.
I think it was literally the night before the jam started where I had the idea of making the magic power-granting artifact an ancestral sword, and the ideas kind of flowed from there. Okay, so sword is medieval fantasy, which I was leaning toward anyway. Magic has to exist, but can't be ubiquitous, or she wouldn't be special. Nobody has been able to use the sword in generations, but only the sons try it, not the daughters. That's a nice compromise between "anyone could have been given this power" and "the power was within you all along", isn't it? I'll make her an Action Girl in a male-dominated world, too. I wasn't really thinking about the jam themes all that much, though they were in the back of my mind, and the ones I was leaning toward at the beginning are the ones that I feel the end product hits best.
To give you an idea of the mindset I was in at that point, the magic sword is named Silvergleam because it's the first thing I could think of and a quick Google search showed nothing overly famous already using it. The names are a mix of frantic Googling, scrolling through 20000-names.com, and references to various metal musicians. Fortunately I did write down where most of them came from.
The setting I’m using here isn’t well developed, and it’s pretty much vaguely defined as “you know that TV show with the dragons? it’s like that but slightly more magical and slightly less grimdark”. I didn't even bother drawing up a full map of the world or naming any of the regions that the game isn't set in. I have two of my own settings that are better developed but I didn’t use them because they wouldn’t work for the story I had in mind (one is science fantasy, the other is fantasy but much more egalitarian and magical). Game Of Thrones also influenced the visual style of the game, as much as a high production value TV show can influence horrendous programmer art anyway.
I have a complex love-hate relationship with Game of Thrones and the books it's based on, and in a way Shattered reflects both the things I love about it and the things that frustrate me to no end. But that's a story for another day (probably).
I (re)watched Iron Man a week or two before the jam (time flows weirdly under lockdown) and there are some similarities in the plot. It's not a complete knockoff of that particular movie, but I, um, borrowed a few story beats, and the plot is a generic superhero origin story. Protagonist goes through some tragedy, gains powers, adapts to their newfound powers while kicking ass and defeating some new enemy that may or may not have been responsible for the original inciting incident. I don't think I started with superheroes in mind, but I realized pretty quickly the similarities despite the difference in setting and decided to go in that direction. I'm not a rabid fan of the superhero genre, but I'm reasonably familiar with it and the Marvel movies in particular.
I'm quite tired, and that's gone on long enough, so I think I'll leave it there for now. Tomorrow: How I hit (or didn't hit) the themes, and what's up with the weird title.