Making of Asterism: Time & Space

Hiya! Just a couple nights ago we released this short game, so today I'll (Miko) be talking about how we made it. The project was primarily for the Shoot for the Stars jam (as well as Yaoi jam), so we spent only about a week on it.

Asterism: Time & Space is a side story for our in development game Asterism, an RPG VN. Asterism is a more shounen-style coming of age story where Kotachi, Ophi, and their friends fight shadow monsters and save constellations (namely the Zodiac). However, for this side story we wanted something cute and relaxing- a date!

Since Kotachi and Ophi only start dating in the true ending for Asterism, this side story is set after Asterism. Hope that's not confusing!

One of the cohosts of the jam and a previous collaborator, Ohisashi, did the sprite artwork. It's different from the soft-shaded sprites in Asterism, but isn't Ohi's style cute?

The script is only 1.5k words (1,507 words, to be exact) with most of it being dialogue. Since I knew the script would be under 5k words, I focused on dialogue than padding it with too much narration. After finishing most of it, I started testing it with placeholders.

Foleso did the final GUI, taking us from this:

To this:

The background are all filtered free-to-use photos. We did a lot of different style tests for them!

We ended up picking a sorta blotchy style.

INI

As we can see in the above screenshot, there's an extra person interrupting their date! Towards the middle-ish of the story, Kotachi and Ophi bump into Ini, one half of the constellation Gemini. What he’s doing there we won’t spoil here, but it’s probably related to his sister… Whatever it is, he’s not happy to be at the museum.

SPACE PENGUINS

A running motif of the jam became space penguins as sort of an inside joke, so I added some!

Originally we were going to pick between the designs, but I decided to put both of them in.

Which one do you like better?

And that's about it! If you'd like to see some additional WIP images and the process for the ending CG, you can read more on our website! Let us know if you liked this little side story and if you'd like more in the future (for any of our titles) ♥

— Miko