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The idea for Fragpunk started with an all-too-relatable everyday tragedy: a smashed phone screen.
But while the neon light spectrum smeared across broken and battered tech perfectly encapsulated the simultaneously rebellious and dystopian feeling that Fragpunk aimed to capture, the metaphor went deeper still.
When so much of our day-to-day is wrapped up in that one device, the splintered screen represents a fractured world and different, disparate and yet somehow parallel views of the same reality.
Fragpunk takes place in the Shardverse, a world shattered by a mysterious element called Glunite which gave regular people from alternate realities amazing powers, but made them reliant on the supernatural substance to survive. Now working as mercenaries called Lancers, they fight on different Shards over whatever Glunite they can find.
Between every round, players in Fragpunk are dealt Shard Cards, which Lancers use to twist the world around them to their advantage or the detriment of enemies. They can be as silly as turning on big head mode for the enemy team, or game-changing as tearing open a portal to a parallel version of the map you’re playing on that Lancers can jump between on-the-fly and essentially double the playing space on offer.
So, in that sense, Fragpunk’s multiverse isn’t just visual, but contributes to gameplay as well.
“What I think makes our game stand out is the experience that no two rounds are ever the same,” Fu Wenhe, Fragpunk narrative director at Bad Guitar studio says. “We’ve done this by sticking to our core idea, to bend the rules and break the norms. We do this consistently through our art design, our narrative design and our gameplay design.
“From the very beginning our goal for designing this game is so it can be played and enjoyed by global players, so as you can tell, a lot of our ideas or inspirations are learning from global mainstream media.
“For example, our art style – with a mix of 2D and 3D – was inspired by the Spider-Verse movies.”
But with Fragpunk, the Spider-Verse inspiration seems to be more than just aesthetic.
While the characters might come from different alternate universes, one of the key parts of the Spider-Verse style is that, despite their disparate elements, the characters still have a sense of harmony with the world and cast around them.
In this, Fragpunk’s goal is to emulate that idea of a cohesive world that’s instantly recognisable, but where the roster feels both familiar and different at the same time. It’s a tough balance which the development team hopes to achieve by taking a narrative-first approach to each character’s place in the game’s world.
“What we’re trying to avoid is focusing on a single character,” Li Yiming, Fragpunk art director, explains. “So we wanted all of the characters to have a consistent logic and design guidelines including the style, appearance, animations, skill effects and colour use as well.
“We want to give an overall balance of all the characters so they can show their individual personalities, but also give a unified consistent art style.”
“We had the lore set down from the very beginning of the game, but it’s true that we’ll gradually and continually update our setting during game development,” Fu adds. “It’s the narrative team who gives the lore and the prototype of the character idea, then the art team comes up with a lot of different design elements while also providing their suggestions, then we’ll discuss which prototype is worth pushing forward with.”
Almost as important as Fragpunk’s characters though are the maps and environments they inhabit, which are often the most visible manifestations of the Shardverse and multiple realities at play in-game.
While Fragpunk is a competitive shooter at heart, Bad Guitar has also tried to bring the classic map archetypes that it draws on – your transport depots full of corridors and trucks to blow up, your crumbling temples full of waist-high walls to jump over and slide behind – into its distinct style too; again by placing their narrative reason to exist within the Shardverse at the forefront.
Our working process with the map design team is a parallel line,” Fu says. “[The narrative team] give them a rough theme and they’ll design the map – the player routes, the bomb site – but what the narrative does is set the environment, the location and the lore behind it. But we try not to give them too many requirements to give them a lot of freedom.”
“When the map design is finished by the design teams, they then give the map back to us so we can give the locations different callouts, signatures and decorations so players can easily distinguish between different callouts,” Huang Jingsi, a narrative designer working on Fragpunk, continues.
“Although the job was under the narrative team, there were two things we wanted to achieve: first, we wanted to make sure the names were consistent with the lore and world of Fragpunk, but second we also wanted to make sure that players could easily call out locations to their teammates. As you can see from the previous demos, most of these names are common names like ‘mid’, ‘A-side’, ‘B-side’”.
However, while the narrative benefit of parallel universes is obvious, in the hero shooter and free-to-play live service genre where there’s an expectation of new characters, maps and seasonal themes across a period of many years, it can also serve a practical purpose as well.
This is a reality Bad Guitar is up front about, especially in the battle for attention all competitive FPS games need to fight. The Shardverse not only provides a compelling conceit for the action in Fragpunk to take place, but a genuine and unforced way to explore different fashions, references and even lore-rich moments from a character’s backstory or possible future in a way that still feels more serious than the Ready Player One-esque hodge podge of other live service games.
“When we were designing the Shardverse, we were designing it intentionally because we’re a hero shooter – especially a hero shooter with a punk art style,” Fu explains. “A punk art can include a lot of different design materials, so we wanted to have this very inclusive world view and lore to give more space to design and future development.”
“For our skins we’ll have different ranks, so for the lower ranked skins we might just change the colour or the materials, but for the higher skins we’ll have a lot of breakthroughs that you can’t imagine what they’ll become,” Li clarifies.
“The aim for us is to make things that look cool, or funny, or we have an idea for higher level skins where it shows a moment in their story – it could be the past or the future, a certain moment of this character.”
But Bad Guitar’s ambition isn’t just to dig into these ideas with paid-for cosmetics, but to deepen and diversify Fragpunk’s lore through a range of different media. As well as in-game environmental, emergent and atmospheric storytelling, both digital graphic novels and animations are on the cards.
“We’re very inclusive of all kinds of media and would like to use all kinds of media to explore our game’s lore,” Fu states. “As you can tell in-game, we’ll have the text telling you the story, but also the character’s voice lines tell you about their stories.
“Then we’ll have comics telling story updates, the skins. For out of the game, we’ll have comics, animated trailers, and we’re trying to use all kinds of media to tell the story.”
For more about gameplay and how Fragpunk feels like every shooter, everywhere, all at once, also check out our preview and interview with Bad Guitar creative director, Xin Chang.
Fragpunk will release on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store on March 6th. The PlayStation and Xbox console version had to be delayed and is coming at a later date.
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Kurt Indovina
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