Posted October 25, 2021 by mut
This week we were assigned 2 tarot cards each to make our prototypes, the cards I drew were:
I initially wanted not to look up the meaning, and try to interpret the cards myself. I’ll just paste my notes here:
I felt the cards were very hard to use as actual parts of games, mechanically. The page of pentacles seemed like a somewhat less combative version of “it’s dangerous to go alone, take this”. And the ten of cups is very optimistic, and like good ending, nice place to be. So I kinda thought of getting NES games that have that specific moment of calling to action, and cutting to a cute game. Played kirby and bubble bobble 2 which were very good.
I couldn’t feel the impulse to do an NES thing, and couldn’t think of a mechanic, so I just decided to go to models resource and try making a nice place to be with a character that resembled the page of pentacles. Maybe work on improving my third person platformer (which I might’ve actually made worse haha).
Eventually I asked ty if my character looked for the page of pentacles and he said it didn’t look like it, which made me want to really push it. So I pivoted to just recreating the cards as best as I could with models from models resource. I found this village, which I am now convinced that was made thinking of the background of the ten of cups. Also got a mario kart level that had mountains and trees. Rainbow road as the rainbow was the initial idea, so that was also a thing. Finally I looked for some family models and thought the ones from Family Pirate Party were pretty funny.
These were the results:
I then got to playing a bit with the 3d platformer code, I wanted to do some directional long jump, but it was late and I was too tired. I realized that in the end this thing actually maps in an interesting way to both the cards. It got me thinking of the white room where mario is trapped during development to make sure his movement is as good as possible when there’s nothing but movement to do, which felt somewhat relevant to the page of pentacles, someone that got a new thing (in Marios case the power to move) and was supposed to do it. I gave mario in this case a nice place to be, a paradise rather than a limbo. Maybe that’s how it should be done, so that mario is happy in jumpy paradise.