With the “day to day” nature of Shoot for the Stars, the player will be able to end their day by sleeping in their bed at night. This will allow the player to advance to the next day to continue progressing the story, but between that it will be important to communicate which day they will be advancing to. This is especially important when on certain occasions days may be skipped.
We originally planned to display this through a calendar display. Playing with the idea of what is in theme with a card game RPG, we were attracted to the concept of drawing cards from your deck. This coalesced into the current day being displayed as a card on the table, which contains the vital information about the day. When transitioning to the next day, you would draw the new day card from your deck, as the previous day is then discarded to your discard pile.
This behavior is controlled through our previously mentioned visual novel system. A custom event command was created to help keep beats during the story, allowing us to skip straight to a new day when necessary. To give even more control, we also allow the command to specify a number of days to skip by. If perhaps we want to skip over a weekend, the transition screen will race through the additional cards in turn to show the progression of time appropriately.
We decided the transition screen would be a closeup of the desk in the club room with various objects on the desk. Originally we were thinking of either magazines or playmats, but then we thought it would be more interesting to see the different objects that represent each member of the club.
In order to get a proper shot for the scene, we set up an actual scene with similar objects as to be seen in the TerraZone transition scene. After a few takes, we finally got just the right shot we needed.
We were also playing around with the idea of the scene potentially having some more details, but decided it would be best to go with our “black shadows” as seen in the other menus for consistency.
Finally, we knew we needed to add one more piece of flavor to the “calendar cards”. At first, we were thinking of making a picture for each month of the game. This led into us going over creatures planned for the game. We remembered we had a “Season Warrior” archetype planned for a later set and realized how fitting this would be. We assigned each Season Warrior to a 3 month interval. In the demo, we will get a sneak peak at “Season Warrior Autumn,” who is expected to cover the months of September, October, and November.
Next week we will take a look at the music seen inside the game! We had a brief interview with our Musician, and we will have some samples to listen to. Thank you once again for tuning in on another devlog and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter to keep up to date. See you next time TerraZone fans!