for tarot ask game -
The Devil — What motifs or mechanics do you just keep coming back to? OR What is a game you’ve enjoyed playing in the last year?
The Sun — Talk about a game you’ve made that you’re proud of.
From the RPG designer Tarot ask game.
The Devil — What motifs or mechanics do you just keep coming back to? OR What is a game you’ve enjoyed playing in the last year?
I talked in Luke's devil ask about what a big sicko I am for dice pools and how much I liked playing Last Train to Bremen — so I'm going to try and avoid that one here and talk about cards instead. I love a deck of cards! I've been circling around finding a way to use them as more than just a prompt deck — first in Mirror Mirror, a very small game jam game about convincing your partner that you are the real person and they are the reflection, then in Otherland, another jam submission where you turn over cards one by one to draw a map of fairyland in the style of an exquisite corpse*, and now finally in The Book of 13 Hours, my most explicitly "we're just doing magic here" game, which offers thirteen different ways to use a deck and an icon to talk to a god(dess).
Idk. I like cards a lot, and I like thinking about them as physical objects and not just randomness generators. I feel the same way about dice, but I think cards — by virtue of their physical form — are a little easier to use to break people of the idea that drawing a card/rolling a die is equivalent to a random number generator.
*Otherland is, imo, one of my more prototype-y prototypes. I'm not totally pleased with where it sits, even as one of my scrimshaw games, but I mention it because it's worth tracking the development of an idea.
The Sun — Talk about a game you’ve made that you’re proud of.
Less a game I've made — more a game I'm making. I think every designer has a project that they, if given a pension or whatever, could work on for the rest of their lives and mine is Leafs House. Leafs House is a work of interactive fiction about exploring an empty old house on the borders of fairyland. It's about nostalgia and loss and the first chapter — about fifty pages — is the only thing that exists online right now.
In it, you explore the first room of a big old house full of little secrets and hidden games. Leafs House was originally conceived of as a kind of a games portfolio in the form of a game — even though I've moved away from that particular version of it, you can still find little pared down or early versions of Beneath Pirate Flags, Grief in the Grand City, and March of the Holly King — among others — hidden in the text. It is going to grow.
I want to come back to it someday. I haven't found the time yet. You can get it through my patreon – or in another way, which is secret :)