2025 Plans Survey | Patreon Poll #61 (Patreon)

Hey Patrons! Firstly, if you haven’t already, check out the latest blog post on ShatteredPixel.com. A lot of the text here is taken from there, and IMO the website is a more pleasant reading experience.

In that blog post, I do my usual thing of sharing plans for the coming year and beyond, but this time I thought it would be nice to try and more directly gauge interest in these things. So, to start off 2025, I’m doing a survey here on all of the options discussed in that blog post. Please let me know which things most excite you!

The result of this poll will help me gauge excitement for the various future dev ideas I’ve in the recent 2025 blog post.

Poll Options

Please vote for all the options that you like, not just for your one favourite! I allow multiple votes as it means that a higher proportion of people will end up voting for the winning choice. Note however that multiple choice polls have been finicky on Patreon for a while, so you may need to refresh the page/app to verify your choices or vote for multiple options.

All patrons are encouraged to share their opinion by commenting and voting, but currently only the votes from Golden+ Supporters are counted when determining a poll winner. Votes from Shattered Supporters are worth double!

Releasing The Cleric: Just like with 2024, this year starts with an update partway through development. My first priority this year is to get v3.0.0 and the Cleric finished and released! Right now the Cleric is missing some polish, one subclass, and two armor abilities. Expect to see those get filled in very soon.

Warrior Improvements: After v3.0 I'm going to do a smaller update so that I can quickly address any issues with the Cleric. As part of that update, I'd also like to take a look at the Warrior! I'm not planning any fundamental changes, but I think I can make his base gameplay feel stronger and more engaging, without making him harder to play.

Misc. Improvements: I expect to do other small changes this year as well, both in v3.1 and later. These tend to get pinned down right when I start work on an update though, so I can’t really say what specific smaller things will happen. This includes things such as further item improvements, UI/UX improvements, more badges, new room types, etc.

City Quest: After these hero changes, I'd like to add a new quest in 2025 as well. My current concept is to have the Imp ask the player to raid a special dwarven vault. The major catch will be that none of the player's items can go with them, leading to a little microcosm of gear progression that will only exist within the vault.

Hero Lore: With the game's sixth hero releasing soon, there's finally opportunity to start fleshing out the game's characters a bit! This lore could include journals written by the heroes from their perspectives, or documents that describe interactions and conversations between the heroes.

3rd Caves Quest: The caves quest is also currently missing a 3rd variant. While I decided to focus on other content through 2024, I would like to finish this quest up in 2025 if there's time or I come up with a great concept. I do still think that other content should take priority though, such as a quest in the city.

In-Game Art: Lastly, there's the new art I previously showed off. Unfortunately things have stalled a bit here, so I don't have anything new to share. However, the reaction to the WIP new art has made it very clear to me that there's a strong demand for this, so I will be trying to make some progress here this year one way or another.

(Note that the following items can be voted on but are further off, they aren’t in consideration for 2025)

Halls Quest: While I don’t want to make the game overly long, a bit more gameplay at the tail end of the game is sorely needed to give players a bit more time with finished builds and time to make use of armor abilities. I have a few ideas for interesting quests that could test an endgame character.

More Subclasses: It would be nice to add one more subclass to each hero to better take advantage of Shattered’s increased equipment and class diversity. However, it’s important that I have a good idea for all six heroes to ensure that all of the new subclasses are interesting. I’ve started to come up with some ideas here, but nothing concrete yet.

Endless Mode: Some form of endless mode is a very common request. This partly ties in to the last region of the game being the shortest, but also there’s just a desire for players to see how far they can get with strong character builds. I have a few loose ideas for how endless might work, but want to focus on other things like new quests first.

Alt Paths?: Another common request is to have more dungeon floors, but just adding more risks making the game too long. An alt path could offer new environments and enemies without making the game directly longer. This would be a huge time commitment though, so I’d only really consider it when ShatteredPD is otherwise finished.

Something New?: Lastly, you might have noticed that the lists on these posts have been slowly shrinking over the years. Eventually everything here will be cleared, and it’ll be time for something new! This is still a ways off though, and I have no current plans for what form this may take, it could be more ideas for Shattered, or something else entirely.