Terrazone: Shoot for the Stars is a hybrid RPG and Card Battle Game, taking inspiration from the Persona series for its story based sections, and a slew of inspiration from other collectible card games such as Cardfight Vanguard, Wixoss, and Yugioh. We hope many of you may find this unique combination intriguing, and look forward to showing how we will be integrating these two types of games together soon.
After a few weeks we have been hard at work putting together story outlines and creating concept work for characters and general UI design. On the technical side we’ve also been hard at work putting together a basic engine for map traversal.
Our game is planning to split its perspective into 3 equal parts, determined by how far along the length of the map you have traveled. Players will notice that from the left of the map they will find themselves in an isometric perspective, then as they travel along, move into a standard 2D perspective, before finding themselves in a mirrored isometric perspective again.
This is achieved through defining a perspective line for objects depending on what portion of the map those objects are located in. The perspective line is used to determine the sorting of objects based on the relative location of other objects in relation to the line. Objects on one side of the line are considered to be in front of the current object, while objects on the opposite side of the line are considered behind the current object. After determining which objects are behind other objects, we can then use a topological sort to create the order of objects in the scene.
We hope this change in perspective will simulate the experience of existing in a 3D environment, while still providing a 2D experience for the player.
Next week we will be delving deeper into characters, and how they will be animated for the game. Thank you for reading, and we look forward to seeing you in the next one!