Witness to Unity and The Calendar

Being a creative is a curse, I swear, sometimes.

I was talking with a friend about Witness to Unity, and struggling with some mechanical and structural thoughts I had for it. Specifically around its calendar/day-night system.

I started thinking about it again after watching a little of Metaphor's demo gameplay, and I saw it had a five day calendar system. If I was going to extend WTU's gameplay loop to try and balance out some pacing issues I was worrying about, maybe I didn't have to even have seven days in a week! However this gets into other tricky factors about WTU, and that is by its nature of a world-hopping story.

  • Shouldn't each world have its own calendar?
  • Shouldn't each world run on a different day-night cycle, effectively having different timezones?
  • Shouldn't each world have its own currency?

All of these are answered no not for any world-building reason, but because of player convenience. (And my own.) World-building-wise it makes more sense for there to be multiple currencies. Gameplay wise there's no benefit — it's more numbers to juggle and there's no trade or economy system in mind. My current plan has been you're using some kinda company or social credit that Metia's boss Baldeur adjusts as you buy/sell things, even interplanetarily. I'm not sure how much sense it makes, but it's the best I have currently.

So this leads to the question of Witness to Unity and a calendar system. WTU started having a calendar (or at least a single month timeframe) because it was originally meant to have a fated End of the World(s) and the party had to work to stop it before then. This was later cut out due to narrative issues it repeatedly presented. The threat of the End now happens in the climax, and I cut the timeframe down to just a week. Along the way turned the free-form flow of time into strictly story-based, so the seven days of the week were basically chapters.

However I have been concerned lately that this week timeframe has its own problems — sometimes I feel like there's not enough time for the plot I have in mind, and other times too much empty time. I once again found myself dwelling on a calendar system where I could better spread out story beats over the flow of time.

My friend asked basically: does having a calendar matter? What about just counting the days? Why does a calendar matter with all the world-hopping?

My concern was how to establish a specific timey-wimey plot point time window. In my mind it made the most sense with a clear flow-of-time - a certain side character is off trying to do their own thing on certain days, your goal is to change their plans before then. I didn't want player action to feel directly responsible for locking them out of this intervention - even though this is just how video games work.

... and after all, all this circling around and pondering, I then thought "maybe I should just make it 'after X chapter' is the cut-off point". Instead of days I just can use chapters — like not even days as chapters, just chapters — I don't even have to divide between a notion of days, I could divide it further if I need to.

Being a creative is a curse, it's so easy to get tunnel-vision around a specific solution to a problem you have, when maybe the problem is because of the solution you're trying to use.