Welcome to Liminal Realms Studio: Introducing Shattered Bounds

TLDR

• Shattered Bounds is a long-term project to turn real parks, streets, and public spaces into a living, walkable AR MMORPG layered over everyday life.
• Liminal Realms is the one-person studio building it, with a multi-stage roadmap: SB: Battlegrounds → The Tower → AR-MMORPG → Shattered Bounds – Park → The Coliseum.
• My background in finance and HEMA app development shapes a focus on safety, sustainable planning, and making play feel like a real adventure full of wonder.
• Shattered Bounds is designed for future AR glasses, with AI-driven NPCs and enemies that adapt, remember, and evolve so the world can eventually exist anywhere on the planet.
• This blog will share monthly deep dives and weekly dev blogs as SB: Battlegrounds launches in Ottawa, inviting future players and potential collaborators to follow – and eventually help build – the journey.
• What’s Next: SB: Battlegrounds Deep Dive (Formerly Proto Park)

Imagine putting on a pair of AR glasses and seeing your city in a different light.

Monsters are crawling out of hollows you’ve never noticed in the park. Elves and dwarves are hawking their wares on the street corner. A quiet field becomes a battleground. Your familiar world hasn’t disappeared – it’s been overlaid with another one.

That parallel world is what I’m calling Shattered Bounds: a long-term project to turn our everyday spaces into a living, walkable MMORPG where you really are your character.

We’re starting small, with simple games like King of the Hill. But the goal is much bigger: to grow those foundations into a complete, persistent world that exists alongside our own.

Who Is Liminal Realms Studio?

Liminal Realms Studio is the team building everything around Shattered Bounds: the games, the tech, the stories, the physical spaces, and the tools that connect them.

Right now the “we” is mostly just me – a one-person team working with the help of AI tools – and I’ve been actively developing this project for about a year and a half.

It began as a simple idea:

What if there was a park you could walk through, like Disney World – but instead of rides and shops, it was full of monsters to battle and quests to take?

From that question, the vision evolved into something more ambitious:

What if we could walk a living MMORPG?

The Roadmap: How Shattered Bounds Grows

The grand vision for Shattered Bounds is divided into stages. Each one builds on the last:

1. Shattered Bounds: Battlegrounds (Formerly Proto Park): A proof of concept: small, focused games like King of the Hill in a controlled space. This is where we test safety, fun, tech, and operations.
2. The Tower: Story-driven, party-based runs in an augmented space, plus a Guild Hall where players gather, prepare, and share stories between adventures.
3. The AR-MMORPG (name pending): Extending access so players can enter Shattered Bounds from their own communities, homes, and parks – still grounded in the real world, but layered with persistent game systems.
4. Theme Park (name pending): A physical AR village you can visit: a location from Shattered Bounds brought into reality, with quests to take, NPCs to meet, and spaces to explore.
5. The Coliseum: For the true experts: large-scale encounters with world-boss enemies, designed as shared spectacles that spectators can watch while players battle.

This isn’t a one-year project. It’s a long journey with many steps, and the SB: Battlegrounds is our first foothold.

Who’s Building This, and Why?

My background is in finance, and more recently I’ve been programming mobile apps focused on Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA). That combination means I spend a lot of time thinking about:

• How to make things financially sustainable, not just exciting on paper.
• How people move, fight, and learn with real-world weapons and bodies.
• How to plan long-term and break a huge dream into practical stages.

My personal priorities for Shattered Bounds are simple:

• Safety – People are moving quickly in real space. The systems, layouts, and rules must be designed with safety first.
• Adventure – It should feel like an actual quest, not just a tech demo.
• Wonder – Players should leave feeling like they stepped into something bigger than themselves.

Why AR, Not Just VR?

I believe AR glasses will eventually become powerful and common enough to support
rich, persistent virtual worlds layered over our reality.

Shattered Bounds is being built for that future.
Instead of being stuck in a room with a VR headset, players will be able to:

• Walk through their own communities,
• Explore local parks and public spaces,
• Meet friends in person,
• And see an entire fantasy world woven through those real places.

The aim is not to replace the world we live in – but to add a second layer of meaning and adventure on top of it.

A Living World, Powered by AI

To make Shattered Bounds feel alive, we’re planning for AI-driven NPCs and enemies that can:

• Adapt to how players behave,
• React to local conditions and history,
• And evolve over time as the world changes.

Instead of static quest-givers repeating the same lines forever, NPCs can gradually remember, adjust, and respond. This also opens the door to expanding Shattered Bounds to anywhere on the planet -anyone with the right AR hardware could step into it.

That’s the long-term horizon. SB: Battlegrounds is how we start learning, safely and in a focused environment.

What This Blog Will Cover

This blog is here to document the journey and share Shattered Bounds as it grows. You can expect two main types of posts:

1. Monthly Deep Dives
   Once a month, I’ll publish a focused article exploring one aspect of Shattered Bounds in detail:
   • SB: Battlegrounds pilot,
   • The Tower concept,
   • Smart weapon controllers,
   • AI-driven NPCs,
   • Or specific lore and locations.
2. Weekly Dev Blogs
   Shorter, more personal updates about the actual work:
   • Prototyping, testing, and debugging,
   • Writing and worldbuilding,
   • Hardware and software experiments,
   • Planning, spreadsheets, and hard decisions.

If you’re curious about how something like this is built – from idea to first playable experience – these dev posts are for you.

Starting in Ottawa, Aiming for Everywhere

Shattered Bounds will begin in Ottawa, Canada. SB: Battlegrounds is planned as the first physical manifestation: a place where local players can try early experiences and help shape what comes next.

Long-term, the systems are being designed so that:

• Experiences can be replicated in other cities,
• Content can adapt to local environments,
• And the same account and character will travel with you.

This blog is an early window into all of that – both for:

• Future players who might one day walk into the SB: Battlegrounds or Shattered Bounds – Park, and
• Potential collaborators who see pieces of this and think, “I want to help build that.”

If that’s you, I’m glad you’re here.