prototype 6 - tarot cards

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:

• ten of cups
  • bubble bobble 2 rainbow islands
  • kirby
  • sponge bob imagination
  • description:
    • two children jumping and playing on a flat plane, nearby they are two adults, praising the sunny rainbow made of cups.
    • on the background you are a river, some trees and a single house.
    • the composition is heavy on the top and the bottom
      • the bottom part having the earthly aspect of life, bucolic, but happy. The entirety of the human part of the image takes less than a third of the vertical height of the image.
      • the top part has a half circle, with small lines pointing towards its center. it takes almost half of the composition.
    • Some self assigned meaning.
      • Happiness
      • good fortune
      • bucolic
      • good omens
      • freedom
      • faith bringing good outcome
      • god being nice
• page of pentacles
  • description:
  • big person, maybe just close to the camera, holding giant coin, they seem indiferent towards the coin, but still holding it with respect (forgot the better word but like holy respect: Reverence!)
  • dude seems kinda royal, the coin is important as a thing but not monetary
  • again, very interesting that the composition has just a little bit of land in the bottom even lower than the other one I feel
  • yellow sky is intense, same color as the pentacle as well
  • self assigned meaning:
    • reverence
    • safe travels
    • power
    • luck, fate, embracing them
    • message
  • interesting meaning from learntarot.com
    • make your plans real
    • use your body
    • act on your dreams
    • stop daydreaming

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.