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I'm not sure if anyone is reading these but I need to write them anyway to clear my head. This will be the last entry. I'm going to talk about some of the lore that I came up with that didn't make it into the game, where I might take this in the future, and some of the brilliant (?!) ideas I had after the jam. This one's going to be shorter, I think, it's just tying up a few loose ends.

I like to throw a lot of nods and easter eggs into my games, but unfortunately I wasn't able to get as many into this one as I'd liked. I snuck a song cover into one of the levels, there's a dialogue that references Skyrim in a very blunt way (actually a test thing I forgot to remove), and I think that's it. There's also a special easter egg for my friend who said that Briella looked like a "battle lesbian" (whatever that is, and you know who you are). And many of the characters are named for metal musicians. So I guess maybe it's not as sparse as I thought.

I did start jotting down some notes about the backstory behind the magical artifacts. It started off with a bunch of random thoughts but distilled down into a set of reasonably coherent ideas by the end of the jam. Don't take any of this as any sort of canon, obviously, because I didn't really do anything with it.

Many houses possess powerful artifacts that only perhaps one man in a hundred generations can use. The exact nature of these artifacts and their origins are lost to time and only legends remain for the most part. In fact, a goddess (we haven't figured out the pantheon yet) granted these to her children after seeing them struggle in the brutal world. It's very rare for men to be able to use any of the artifacts because they're meant to be used by women, meaning their ability is more of a fluke. Over time, powerful, jealous men took control of the artifacts and suppressed knowledge of their true nature.

This never made it into the game for a variety of reasons. I wasn't entirely happy with it- it seemed rather Anvilicious and seemed to have some unfortunate implications in addition to not being well developed. But mostly, there wasn't anywhere to put it in. This magical stuff was meant to be mysterious and the story was about Briella and the conflict with House Garrick, not solving that mystery. If I ever do a sequel, I might try to work that in.

So, what lies in store for Shattered - Why Not Me? I do kind of want to fix some of the issues with this game- mostly the inadequate feedback, floaty movement, and various bugs- but I don't have the energy right now. I might come back to it later, but that would be dependent on having the time, and I suspect other projects and other commitments will take priority.

Will there be a sequel? I think that comes down to time. I'd like to do one, and I have a storyline in mind. It would be about a kind of dark mirror to Briella, another noble lady who gains powers but uses them solely for conquest and revenge. As I mentioned earlier, I'd like to explore some of the lore and backstory as well, and maybe show more of the currently unnamed Kingdom. There would need to be a lot more worldbuilding, that's for sure.

I'm one of those people who has way too many ideas and can never make them all, and indeed I had two immediately after the jam, after playing a few of the other entries, that I feel in retrospect would have been better entries had I come up with them two weeks earlier. Hindsight is always 20/20, and I'm always more inspired after seeing what other people have done.

One of them is a more conventional (I think?) magical girl game where several students at a secret magical girl academy are called forth to stop an ambiguous evil force of magic from invading the world through a portal between realms. It's a struggle, but they succeed in defeating the entity and sealing the portal through the power of friendship and celebrate the defeat of evil and peace forever. The twist is that it's set in the 1930s, with exactly the implications you're probably thinking of.

The other is maybe a little less cynical, but still not exactly conventional. It's set in the future, kind of a Halo or Mass Effect ish space opera military science fiction setting. Our protagonist is a spec ops type, the space equivalent of SAS or Navy SEALs. Suddenly, a magical girl appears, grants her her powers, and dies. She's from the past, and was sent forward in time because at some point all magical girls have died out but a darkness is coming. Most likely she would have a kind of angel on her shoulder which was a wise advisor to previous magical girls but is a complete fish out of water in a world of spaceships and nuclear missiles, and at least at first doesn't get along with her strong, augmented, battle-hardened and cynical charge. In the end, of course, she defeats the darkness, but not without the help of her squad which it turns out she needs despite her new powers.

Most likely, neither of those will see the light of day. Too many idea, too little time. But maybe if there's another Magical Girl Game Jam in the future, it's a possibility.

That's all I have to say for now, but I'm happy to try to answer any questions.