I built a game for a book series that isn't finished

Dispatches from the Archive · No. 3

This might be backwards: I built a game for a book series that isn't finished yet.

It's called The Shattered Realms, and you can play it free in your browser right now.

Play The Shattered Realms →

What it is

A strategy RPG in the spirit of the big sandbox war games. You raise an army, march across a world map, besiege cities, bargain with Realm lords and fight real-time battles. But it's set in the Voidhammer world, so magic always costs something.

When it's set

The game takes place long before The Shattered Gate, in the last season of the Concord, just before the Radiant Edict. All nine Realms still stand. The Void is only stirring. You can't stop what's coming, because the books depend on it. But you decide who survives it, and what gets remembered.

Why build a game at all?

Because it made the world real for me. When you have to decide what a Stonehold soldier's magic actually does to his arm, or how much a Stormreach charge ages the rider, the world stops being notes and starts being a place. A lot of what's in the rewritten books came from asking those questions for the game first.

I built it with a lot of help from AI tools for the code, art and voices, and I'm open about that. The story, the world and the decisions are mine.

What's next

It's still growing: more story, more polish, and eventually a mobile release. If you play it, tell me what you loved and what broke. Reply to any of my emails, or send a message through the site.

And if you want the story the game leads into, Chapter One of The Shattered Gate is free, and Chapters Two to Four are on Patreon.

— John