Inspiration – Deep Dive

TLDR

• Shattered Bounds is an AR MMORPG parallel to the real world, inspired by works like Trapped Mind Project, Frieren, and Sword Art Online – built for player independence and the joy of exploration.
• Player Rooms take cues from FFXIV housing: cozy, personal AR spaces layered over your real environment where you display trophies, companions, and interact with crafting and the player portal.
• The living world draws from Guild Wars, Log Horizon, and Solo Leveling: breaches, rift zones, and events localized to safe real-world spaces like parks and fields, giving the world an evolving, reactive feel.
• The tone and systems mix Frieren’s quiet wonder, Kate Daniels’ grounded world logic, myth-inspired monsters, Monster Hunter–style crafting, and SAO-like skill growth through use, with voice- and motion-driven AR abilities.
• AI personalization inspired by Trapped Mind Project aims to keep core gameplay shared while customizing details like skill descriptions and NPC dialogue so each player’s experience feels uniquely their own.
• What’s Next: First story article

The Inspirations Behind Shattered Bounds

When people ask me, “So what is Shattered Bounds?” I usually boil it down to something like this:

Shattered Bounds is an Augmented Reality MMORPG running parallel to the real world, where players embody their characters and live the experience in their own cities.

That’s the short version. But a world this big doesn’t appear out of nowhere. This post is a look behind the curtain: the stories, games, and experiences that shaped the Shattered Bounds concept and the world it lives in. It’s not a list of things I’m copying, rather a map of the ideas that lodged in my brain and refused to leave until they were given a new home.

If I had to describe Shattered Bounds “just by vibes,” I’d call it:

A mix of Trapped Mind Project (freedom within reality), Frieren (the joy and quiet wonder of adventure), and Sword Art Online (taking control of your own experience).

From there, everything else branches out.

Parallel Markets and Portals – Valerian and The Man Who Planted Trees

A huge part of Shattered Bounds is the idea of overlaid worlds – walking through one reality while seeing another.

The first time that really clicked for me visually was while watching Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, specifically the market scene:

That’s exactly the feeling I want players to experience:

• The inhabitants of Shattered Bounds exist all around,
• But you can only interact with them through adventurer glasses – Magi-Tech created by The Guild.
• Take the glasses off, and the world “disappears”; put them on, and the city suddenly has another layer.

On the immersive, scenic side, The Man Who Planted Trees installation at the Museum of Nature in Ottawa, Ontario was a direct inspiration for Shattered Bounds: Tower:

For SB: Tower, I want projection mapping to:

• Make you feel like you’re walking through portals into new realities,
• Let us re-skin spaces easily – different dungeons, forests, ruins – without rebuilding the physical room every time,
• Combine with AR overlays so everyone shares the same base world, and then their glasses add personal layers on top.

AI and Personalization – Trapped Mind Project

For Shattered Bounds, that means aiming for a world that feels as personal as possible, without breaking the shared gameplay.

Some of the things I would love AI to customize for each player:

• Skill descriptions – two players might “feel” their magic in different metaphors or visual language.
• NPC dialogue nuances – small differences in how characters speak to you based on your history, choices, or interests.

The core experience still needs to be shared – players need to see the same battlefield, enemies, and events so the game is coherent and fair. But within that, there’s room for:

• Small gimmicks,
• Personal triggers,
• Moments where someone says, “Wait, you didn’t see that?” because a detail was uniquely tuned to them.

That contrast between shared world and personal perception is one of the things that excites me most.

The Feel of the Journey – Frieren, Kate Daniels, and Myth

If Shattered Bounds had a heartbeat, a lot of its rhythm comes from Frieren (anime) and the Kate Daniels series by Ilona Andrews, mixed with a love for real-world myths.

Exploration in Shattered Bounds should feel like:

• Wonder – you’re seeing something you weren’t meant to see in an ordinary park.
• Dangerous but hopeful – risk exists, but so does the sense that you can overcome it.
• Exciting – small-scale, personal, but still heroic.

From Kate Daniels, I borrow more from the world logic than the surface details. That series uses tech/magic swings to explain:

• Why the world is the way it is,
• Why certain things work sometimes and fail at others.

In Shattered Bounds, instead of literal tech/magic waves, I’m building around:

• A reality split,
• Where Magi-Tech from our world allows adventurers to interact with a magic world that’s trying to bleed back in.

The gear you use and the tools you carry are rooted in our reality – but designed specifically to withstand the other one.

As for monsters and myths, I like working with real-world mythologies because they give everything a grounded feel:

• Greek, Russian, Babylonian, and other mythologies provide a familiar anchor.
• You recognize a creature’s general idea even if you’ve never read a bestiary.

The plan is to:

• Respect the base explanations and origin stories of those creatures,
• While reimagining how and where they appear in Shattered Bounds,
• Especially in relation to why they’re showing up near certain rifts or locations will evolve, but this gives us a clear start to design around.

Living Events and Breached Worlds – Guild Wars, Log Horizon, Solo Leveling

Shattered Bounds is built on the idea that the world is not static. That comes from a mix of Guild Wars (pc game mmorpg), Log Horizon (anime), and Solo Leveling (anime).

From Guild Wars, I love:

• Sudden world events,
• Areas under invasion,
• And the moment when players spontaneously gather to push something back.

I’m fascinated by how those events briefly reframe the map: a familiar location becomes a temporary hotspot that demands attention.

It makes the world feel less like a backdrop and more like a living system.

You can already see echoes of this in SB: Battlegrounds: breached zones where enemies cross over and need to be dealt with.

In Shattered Bounds, I imagine world events as:

• Occurrences in town zones and parks,
• Often timed or location-based,
• Always grounded in what’s safe and practical in the real world.

The danger is thematic and in-world, but the actual activity is designed around real safety and real locations.

Systems and Progression – Another Eden, Monster Hunter, Sword Art Online

Underneath the fantasy, Shattered Bounds still needs systems that feel good to play with.

I’m drawn to the idea that:

• Gear is not something you just buy from a store,
• But something that comes from your experiences and choices.

The exact grind/accessibility balance is still to be decided – that will likely be shaped during development of SB: Tower and beyond – but the principles are:

• Certain enemies and drops only appear in specific zones,
• There can be limited-time events or special occasions with unique materials,
• World bosses and special encounters provide distinctive rewards.

For Shattered Bounds, that starts to look like:

• A skill system with branches for:
  • Combat,
  • Magic,
  • Crafting,
  • Utility.
• Skills that interact with AR in specific ways:
  • Magic is vocal: certain spells use spoken incantations or voice commands.
  • Combat is action-based: skills trigger from specific movements or combos with your weapon controller.
  • Crafting is also action-based: swinging a hammer or performing certain motions can improve your results over time.
  • Utility is interaction-based: asking NPCs the right questions builds up skills like Identify, which might eventually let you see incoming attacks or hidden information.

The goal is a progression system where what you do and how you do it matters as much as numbers on a sheet.

Your Own Space in the World – Player Rooms and FFXIV

One of the clearest influences comes from Final Fantasy XIV and its player housing. What I love most about those spaces is simple:

In Shattered Bounds, that same feeling shows up in the concept of the Player Room. I want this space to evoke:

• Comfort – a place you return to between adventures.
• Pride – a room that visibly reflects what you’ve done and who you are.

Because Shattered Bounds is augmented reality, the Player Room isn’t just a floating digital box. It overlaps with your real environment. That means thinking about:

• How virtual objects can exchange places or sit alongside real furniture.
• How we can add perceived depth and layers even in small or awkward physical spaces.

It’s not only for trophies on the wall (though there will absolutely be trophies). It’s also where you:

• Display companions,
• Arrange lore items,
• Interact with crafting and the economy,
• And connect to your player portal.

The Player Room is where the adventure breathes out – and where your story settles into something tangible.

Bringing It All Together

Looking across all of these inspirations, a few themes stand out:

• Player independence – shaping your own path, build, and experiences.
• Layered realities – two worlds occupying one space, and you choosing to step between them.
• Adventure with stakes – dangerous but hopeful, wondrous but grounded.

I’m not trying to copy any single work. Each influence contributes a small, specific piece:

• Valerian’s market scene for AR overlay,
• FFXIV’s housing for Player Rooms,
• Guild Wars and Log Horizon for living events,
• Solo Leveling for breaches and rifts,
• Frieren for quiet wonder,
• Kate Daniels for history and logic of the split,
• Monster Hunter and Another Eden for crafting,
• Sword Art Online for skills and freedom,
• Trapped Mind Project for AI-driven personalization.

Together, they outline a set of parameters – a box of constraints and possibilities – that Shattered Bounds can grow inside.

If there’s only one thing you remember from this post, let it be this:

I’m building Shattered Bounds for player independence and the joy of exploration – to give people a way to walk through their own world and see it, just for a little while, as something larger, stranger, and more alive than it looked the day before.

That’s the vision all these inspirations are pointing at. The rest is just the work of bringing it to life.