Coming Soon to Shattered: The Vault Quest! - Shattered Pixel

Evan Debenham

I’m the person behind Shattered Pixel. I make videogames and blog posts, I hope you enjoy them!

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Hey Dungeoneers, after far too long of a wait, v4.0.0 is finally ready for beta!

This update ended up ballooning in size from just adding a new quest, I’d say it’s arguably Shattered’s biggest update yet at this point! There’s a massive new quest, a bunch of new in-game art, 6 new enchantments, and plenty smaller changes and adjustments.

The beta for Shattered v4.0.0 is live right now! You can get it:<br>- On Google Play by opting-in to betas<br>- On the App Store via TestFlight<br>- On Steam, GOG.com, or Itch.io, via beta branches<br>- On Github for Android or Desktop.

In this blog post I’m going to quickly show off some of the now-finished new quest. Don’t expect all the details though, I wouldn’t want to spoil everything!

A Quick Recap & Improvements

I already shared a lot of the base details for the quest in a previous blog post back in March, and gave a small update (along with sharing details on new art) in another post in June. Those details haven’t really changed, but the implementation has been refined a lot even since June. Read over those two posts if you want every detail, but I am going to quickly go over everything and what improvements I’ve made:

Level Shape & Rooms

This new quest involves the Ambitious Imp tasking you with raiding an ancient dwarven vault! The vault is full of hazards, and you can’t take any of your gear with you , but the treasures within the vault are also great!

The vault is still built out of a number of square rooms in a grid, but the specific shape has been improved a LOT:

I’ve toned down the total number of rooms in the vault to prevent the quest from being overly long.

A few new rooms of each type (regular and treasure rooms) have been added to improve variety, and the boss room has been filled in.

I’ve made some big improvements to overall level shape and interconnectedness. This cuts down on dead ends and feeds into the vault looking like a structured grid of rooms.

There’s lots of smaller refinements too, including specific room adjustments, preventing identical rooms from being adjacent to each other, and ensuring the final room is a minimum distance from the entrance.

Here’s what that all those improvements like in practice:

From left to right these images are from November, March, and Today

Enemies, Hazards, & Loot

Lots of the base nuts and bolts are the same here too, but things have been heavily expanded from the tester area in v3.3.8:

Enemies in the vault still use new less aggressive AI behavior to facilitate stealth gameplay, little has changed there.

There are now a total of 7 different enemy types, which lean heavily on existing enemies from the prison to the city. Using these enemy designs makes it easy for the player to tell how dangerous each enemy is.

The three static hazards (scanning sentries, laser sentries, and fire vents) show up in a few more rooms now, and I’ve made some adjustments to ensure they aren’t overly punishing to mis-steps.

Overall loot quantity has been increased, and I’ve added some guardrails to ensure a minimum amount of every kind of equipment gets generated.

Better loot is guarded by stronger obstacles, and I’ve spent a long time refining things to create a satisfying little microcosm of progression within the vault.

What’s New?

Okay so I’ve spent a lot of time finishing up and polishing things that I’ve already talked about, but is there anything totally new? There are two major additions that I hinted at two weeks ago in a status update post, let me elaborate on them a bit more:

Dwarf Tokens and the Mirror

Each treasure room and enemy drops a single dwarf token, ten of which are used to unlock a door in a special room a little bit deeper into the vault. Each token is equally important for this, so there’s a reason to clear weaker enemies and treasure rooms even after you’ve started powering up.

In addition to high-tier regular loot, you’ll also find a mysterious mirror here. I won’t spoil exactly how, but this mirror will let you access your hero’s signature items! This means that each hero gets access to a large chunk of their abilities that require their item, which were lost upon entering the vault. The Duelist is a little different and gets a guaranteed strong weapon here instead.

I’m really pleased with this mechanic, as it helps to regulate the fact that some heroes have powers that are highly dependent on upgrading equipment (Warrior, Mage, Duelist) and others get abilities that scale more strongly with their level (Rogue, Huntress, Cleric). By taking away signature hero items, everyone starts on a roughly equal playing field (no nuking early enemies with Holy Lance!), but after enough powering up it’s safe to re-introduce these items and...