Great project! How did you go about breaking it down into the new form?
A member registered Mar 01, 2022 · View creator page →
Creator of
Various transparent icons collected around New Jersey
A Neurodiverse, Hivemind Journaling TTRPG (Solo/Multiplayer)
A Solo Dwarf-Forged Tower Defense Game
An Artifact Worldbuilding TTRPG
Explore the struggles of two interstellar communities, trying to grow and heal in the remnants of past occupiers.
Recent community posts
itch.io Community » Tabletop Gaming » Design » Original Systems · Created a new topic Sci-fi, Neuroscience, & Dice: Mixing mechanics and thematics
We live in a world of abstractions, where the mind constantly creates and updates mental models to make sense of its surroundings. Memory can be fragile, often fading as we move between spaces, with our internal maps shifting as quickly as we navigate them.1 Simulation is intrinsic to human nature, as is play— a topic I explored just a few weeks ago. Today, I’ll be exploring Hive Synapse Spy Agency, a tabletop game by Austin Lim and Anton Galang, as its background sheds light on the cross-sectionality of neuroscience, science-fiction, and the power of games to envision a new future.
We play to help understand the world around us in a safe environment. It is an adaptive behavior prevalent throughout nature2 that allows a creature to imagine scenarios and test abilities that may aid them when they are met with these encounters.
“Although adults might define as work infants’ struggle to balance and begin to stand or walk independently, infants appear to have intrinsic motivations for achieving these motor skills and show expressions of pleasure in achieving them. Thus, this motor practice appears to be play for infants.” - Garner, B. P. (2021)
So, we create simulations outside our mind in order to form simulations in our mind, all-and-all to understand the world best we can. We are developing creatures, who still use play to grow throughout our lifespan.3 Play is good for the brain.
Read the rest of this article here: https://holisticdice.substack.com/p/neuroscience
itch.io Community » General » General Discussion · Replied to PsychHound in Autistic Creator Co-op Bundle
itch.io Community » General » Release Announcements · Created a new topic Journaling Game where your Goblin's Hoard are their Memories: The Goblin Thought
A Neurodiverse, Meditative Journaling Game (Singleplayer + Multiplayer Expansion)
The Goblin Thought
But unlike all the orcs, elves, witches, living pitch, oracles, and amateur film critics of the land, goblins thought differently.
When a goblin stands short, looks to the heavens, and screeches with all its might atop its hoard, it's expressing a mix of pure anger and joy in a world not quite made for it.
The goblin hoard - a pile of goods and trinkets - is a place of greed, yes. But it's the same greed that thrives throughout this land of men and beetles. It's the allowed selfishness that helps us learn and grow, walk and run, screech and scramble. The hoard is the goblin's memory.
What you see before you may look like trash, but it contains every nook and scratch of a goblin's living and breathing history. Without it, they are reset to factory settings and must start anew. Goblins can survive for a time without a hoard, but if they are gone for too long, they tend to forget things.
The goal of this game is to experience just a fraction of what it's like to be one of these marvelous misfits; to understand a mind separated and compiled by its own and others' experiences, which may not be as alien as you think. Build your hoard with every crook or crevice acting as a neuron firing with life. Make allies and defeat monsters, or simply exist and witness.
Be a goblin, and look upon your story with pride.
