Thanks for playing!
I should preface this by saying I've had a rough week and I'm pretty burned out tonight so some of this will probably come across as saltier than intended.
The story is only vaguely related to Shattered at this point- Shattered 2 proper will tie in a lot more. I can see why it comes across as disjointed here- it is, deliberately so, but I think it ended up a lot more confusing than it was intended. By the time I realized this it was too late to do anything about it. It's too bad, too, because I really liked the concept and a lot of it just doesn't come across.
Yeah, the UI theme is straight-up recycled from another project. To be honest I pretty much take my UI to where I think it's good enough and leave it- I don't have a lot of time to dev, I have to pick my battles carefully and I deemed it low priority for this project in particular. Future games will be better, but not dramatically better.
Tutorial is another thing where I just went with the fastest option possible. It's ungainly but it works.
The magic isn't balanced all that well, yeah. Wave is pretty OP, melee is pretty useless, drain was a lot more useful before regenerating health was added late in the process. I'm planning to tweak this in the future. Shattered 2 (yes, I'm bringing it up again, I'll get to that) will have progression and everything will probably be reweighted against that.
So... Shattered 2 comes up a lot because this is Shattered 2, from a certain point of view. They even share the same Git repository! This game was originally conceived as a pure mechanics demo for Shattered 2. It grew into more than that- I'd call it a full game and not a demo, albeit a short one. I was on the fence about participating in MGGJ3 because of time constraints, but by creating something that was going to lead into a project I already had planned (Shattered 2 was planned to be my big game of 2021, knock on wood) I was able to justify spending that time. Is it a cheese strategy? Yeah, probably, but honestly I'm too busy to not look for opportunities where I can.