Shattered Bounds – Battlegrounds & more

Tag: gaming

  • Adventurer Identity – Cards, Pendants, and the Player Portal

    Date: 2026-03-02

    Article ID: DD-05

    TLDR

    • What this is: A breakdown of the Adventurer Card (physical NFC key) and the Player Portal (digital progression hub).
    • The key decision: Moving away from “one-and-done” sessions by tying player data to a persistent, tangible object.
    • What changes: Every action in a live session—from vocalizing a spell to landing a physical hit—is recorded and reflected in your permanent character profile.
    • What’s next: Integrating the Adventurer Card scan-in at the Ottawa-based Guild Hall for our 2026 alpha tests.

    Quick Facts

    • Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
    • Group Size: 2–6 Players
    • Session Length: Battlegrounds (15 min) / The Tower (60 min)
    • Identity System: Physical NFC Card + Web-based Player Portal
    • Primary CTAs: Donate (Ko-fi) / Partner (email)

    The Problem: The “Static Game” Limitation

    In traditional location-based entertainment, you are often a guest, not a character. Once the headset comes off, your progress vanishes. We wanted to solve the “reset fatigue” by creating a system where:

    • Your physical effort in Ottawa parks or gyms translates into permanent digital growth.
    • The “Magi-Tech” you use recognizes you personally.
    • Your story settles into something tangible that you can hold in your hand.

    The Solution: Card & Portal Integration

    1. The Adventurer Card (Physical Layer)

    The Adventurer Card is a physical, NFC-enabled artifact issued by The Guild. It acts as your “Magi-Tech” key to the parallel world.

    • On-site Utility: When you arrive for a session, you scan your card at the Guild Master’s console. This immediately syncs your current stats, preferred skill loadouts, and character history to the AR headset.
    • Tangible Achievement: It serves as a physical badge of rank, showing you are a recognized member of the Guild.
    • AR Interactivity: Using a mobile app, and eventually Shattered Bounds AR glasses, players can look at their physical card to see dynamic AR overlays. These overlays reveal live updates to your Player Level, active Skills, and earned Badges floating directly above the card’s surface.

    2. The Player Portal (Digital Layer)

    The Player Portal is a web and mobile-responsive dashboard where the “breaths” between adventures happen.

    Key Features of the Portal:

    • Skill & Proficiency Tracking: Observe your growth through a system where skills—Combat, Magic, Crafting, and Utility—increase through continual use rather than fixed classes.
    • Equipment Loadout Management: Organize and equip gear tailored to your playstyle, ensuring your “Magi-Tech” tools are ready before you step through the next portal.
    • Quest Line Monitoring: Review the status of quests accepted at the guild reception and track your progress through the evolving narrative of Shattered Bounds.
    • Harvested Item Vault: Review materials and drops collected from specific monsters during your travels—a critical step for the experience-based crafting system.
    • Spellbook Study (Upcoming Tower Expansion): A dedicated area to master vocal-based magic. This feature will allow adventurers to prepare the specific voice commands and incantations required for high-level Tower runs.
    • World Lore Archive: Dive into the “stories of the world” through collected field reports, bestiary entries on creatures like the goblin horde, and historical fragments of the Shattered Bounds.

    What this means for Players

    • Ownership: You aren’t just renting a headset; you are building a legacy in a living world.
    • Strategic Growth: Your real-world movements (like swinging a sword controller) or vocal commands improve your specific skills over time.
    • Persistence: If you defend a hill in SB: Battlegrounds or complete a quest in SB: Tower, the Guild records your valor. Find a chance to do something special? It could earn you a badge to show off!

    The Future: Adventurer Pendants

    As an update to the card experience, we are planning the development of Adventurer Pendants as a more immersive “Magi-Tech” wearable.

    • Wearable Immersion: Unlike a card in a wallet, the pendant is worn around the neck, fitting the “adventurer” aesthetic while keeping the NFC chip accessible for quick gear-syncing.
    • Enhanced Haptics: Future iterations of the pendant could house light indicators, adding to magic casting experiences
    • Social Signalling: Pendants allow players to identify each other in public spaces (like parks or markets), facilitating spontaneous party formation for world events.

    Key Terms

    • SB Battlegrounds: Our 15-minute, high-intensity AR skirmish loop.
    • The Tower: A 60-minute, multi-floor, story-driven indoor experience.
    • NFC (Near Field Communication): The tech inside your Adventurer Card that allows for instant profile syncing.
    • Magi-Tech: In-world technology developed by the Guild to interact with the magic world.

    Mini FAQ

    • Q: Is this VR? A: No. It is room-scale AR/Mixed Reality. You see the real world around you, with fantasy elements overlaid.
    • Q: Do I need to buy my own headset? A: No. All hardware, including the weapon controllers, is provided on-site for the Ottawa pilot.
    • Q: How do I get my first card? A: You will be able to purchase your Adventurer Card during your check-in for a Battlegrounds or Tower session.
    • Q: Do I have to have a card to player? A: Adventurer Cards are not necessary to play the Shattered Bounds games, however we recommend obtaining one to save your progress.
  • Welcome to Liminal Realms Studio: Introducing Shattered Bounds

    Welcome to Liminal Realms Studio: Introducing Shattered Bounds

    Date: December 1, 2025

    Article: DD-01

    Logo of Shattered Bounds Project: a monster hand reaching through a shattered door.

    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

    Progression of the SB Project from SB: Battlegrounds (Formerly Proto Park), to The Tower, to an AR-MMORPG, to a Theme Park, to The Coliseum

    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.
    AI moving enemy pieces to play against human opponents.

    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.