Creating a believable world means there is more than just TerraZone that exists as a franchise in this universe. So what does that mean exactly? We’ve been putting our heads together and thinking about various fictitious media all over Nostol. One example being the popular drink brand “What’s Zoo Flavor?” or the Tabletop RPG “Caves and Creatures.” Maybe you’re more into comics and want to pick up the comic, “Polly’s Gone to Trap a Zoid,” which funny enough is based off a one shot comic previously created by Rob himself.
Many of the other posters found on the wall are based on real stories both Kayla and Rob have created over the years. These stories appear as “comics” found in the Cards and Comics shop that the player will often visit throughout the game. Likewise, sometimes NPC’s will also be talking about these franchises on occasion when visiting the shop. One that is a direct connection to Shoot for the Stars being the “Clash Poster”. The characters on the poster represent an older design of “TerraZone: Wake the Will” protagonist, Evan and Hayley from previous iterations of TerraZone. Likewise, some of the antagonists found on the poster also appear in the rebooted “TerraZone” franchise with updated designs.
The “DreamScape” poster is an example of a series Kayla once created and plans on later releasing a reboot that includes short stories of her dreams. When Kayla and Rob first became friends back in High School, Rob was working on “Creatures”(now TerraZone) while Kayla was working on “Dreamscape”, which was a comedy fantasy series that had 9 completed chapters at the time. This series had many branches over the years including Kayla’s “Subconscious Saturday” video series. Featured on the poster is the main antagonist “Virgo” from the series.
The “pampleMoose” character actually has an amusing history behind him. Kayla started drinking seltzer right out of college after giving it another try from one of her friends. She used to hate drinking seltzer as a kid, but trying it again as an adult, she really loved the flavor of lemon seltzer. Learning about other brands and seltzers, this trend of drinking “seltzer” trickled into the rest of her friend group, which is also inclusive of Rob himself. We later found a brand of seltzer we really liked, and they had a new flavor “pamplemousse.” We never heard of this flavor or fruit before and read it out loud quite literally “PAMPLE MOOSE?!” (Pāmp-ĕl Mo̅o̅s)And started laughing at how silly that name was. We later found it was the French word for “grapefruit” and is technically pronounced “Pŏmp-lāy-Mo̅o̅s” We decided to keep that joke though of purposely mispronouncing the flavor, just because of that first reaction we had reading it out loud.
Later on, when we were decorating Manager’s shop, we realized the vending machine in the back should have a fictitious brand name. The three of us put our heads together and started listing off names that sounded “refreshing”. To no avail, we still couldn't think of a catchy fictitious name. Rob then remembered our inside joke of “pamplemoose” and decided to turn that into the mascot of this new “brand”. That then snowballed into “animal-like brand names”. The name “Zoo” came to mind and with the world of TerraZone being full of puns, that’s when we came up with “What’s Zoo Flavor?” as the name of this drink company in this universe.
There are many hidden gems to be found in the world of TerraZone, and a lot of thought has been put into the universe. Next week we’ll be going over more details on some basic functionality in the battle system. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter for more information on our content. See you all next week TerraZone fans!