Deep Dive
Shattered is a casual action game controlled with just the mouse. In it, you play as a young ghost visiting a castle to collect fragments of their shattered soul.
With each collected fragments, the enemy Red Spirits get faster and try to catch up; defeating you. There’s also a 10-second time limit on each level and the castle walls hide many contraptions, like walls that move when their respective torch is lit.
This game is our submission for the GMTK Game Jam 2021, with the theme “Joined Together”. It’s my first Game Jam game and one of my personal favorite game despite its age and simplicity.
Polished Leftover Time
After some brainstorming time, we settled on the idea of tethering to your objective collectables,
which seemed interesting while being simple enough for our first Game Jam.
In hindsight, I recognize that we probably could make an entire game with this mechanic. Surely a simple game in the same 2D vein, but there’s some potential there.
This mechanic was coded in under an hour by Ciel… So we had some time to polish things!
Level Design-wise, I tried to make the most out of our gameplay elements: one-way paths, movable walls, and enemies that speed up with each fragment. Level 8 is to my eyes our best level in that regard
I used “Milking”: trying to do as much as possible with as little individual elements.
This shortened our production time and made for a more coherent game overall (on top of making it easier for the player as they have fewer mechanics to learn).
Level 8, the bottom and right fragments are used so you can place yourself correctly following the marked path.
The artistic side of our team had a lot of free time after completing the mandatory elements, so they were able to polish a lot of visual elements: Animated sprites, background tiles for décor, brick variations, paintings, placeable godrays, fog, lightning with its flashes, and even ambiant particle systems!
We all are very proud of this game visually, it turned out looking as polished as we could do.
Designing for Smoothness
One of my best addition in this game is the ever-moving indicator that permanently goes to the fragment closest to your mouse cursor. With its animation always playing and its tracking of the closest fragment, it subconsciously helps players tracking all fragments.
With that, we made the choice to put fragments as our main menu buttons. Together with the indicator, this silently makes players understand that those blue wisps are the objective, that you can interact with them, and this ensures that players know how to move and interact with fragments before even entering the first level.
Our main menu, with the idle indicator tracking where my cursor goes.
Like many other projects I worked on, I composed the music and made the sound effects for this game. The music was made in many pieces that can individually loop, one piece per level, and the next piece would start playing only when entering the next level. This made a smooth-sounding progression of music that seemed natural when playing.
“Last Vows”: A mix of all 11 levels’ soundtracks.
“Ghostly Stand-By”: The main menu theme.
To end this Deep Dive, I am contractually obligated to mention that one of this game’s potential name was “Anima“. Yes, this is a private joke. Twice.