The Sibyls are shuffling their cosmic deck for you... The Hanged Man... The Tower... The Moon... The Wild Rose... The Flock... The Needle... The Armory... Wait, these cards are strange--slippery and inconsistent, and their readers unsettling and inhuman. Just what have you gotten yourself into?

This is a tarot card reading simulator, but it doesn't use the deck you're familiar with. Featuring a bunch of weird custom cards, some of which will shift and change in each unique gameplay session, this sim will reveal your past, your future, and your innermost secret heart!

A Tarot Reading is built in everyone's favorite small game jam platform Bitsy but I hacked the engine to utilize a custom random text generation system. If you like it, please feel free to drop some donations in the collection box or leave a comment; if people dig this I might flesh it out a bit more for a full scale release, as right now it's got a fraction of the number of cards in a real tarot deck. This was done for Procjam 2019. Thanks to the hosts for making this all possible!

FAQ

Q: Can I use the randomgen system for my own project?

A: Ahahahaha don't. It's extremely a work in progress and doing this project actually highlighted some major design issues with it that I want to fix. Also it's like... 40% documented and this version has some jquery dependencies ripped out of it that will break some of the advanced functionality? It's a mess. Feel free to look at it for ideas, though. Of what not to do, probably.

Q: How'd you hook the generation up to Bitsy?

A: It's dead easy to do text manipulation actually. You just have to have some external function (randomgen() in this case) and go into the source code for your exported Bitsy game, and drop your function in here:

this.AddText = function(textStr,onFinishHandler) { 
 textStr = randomgen(textStr);

Pretty straightforward honestly!

Q: Is this set in the same world as A Host Of Gentle Terrors and A Moth Batters Against Glass? 

A: Maybe? No? I don't know, I didn't mean for it to be, but there's some reused random generation corpuses (you might recognize some of the landscapes on The Wayfarer card...) and a squirrel knight shows up on The Needle, and The Shackles of course have a real symbolic weight if you got into the backstory of The Avalerion... but this doesn't have any explicit reference to, say, The Opened of Ways or anything like that, so I guess the answer is that I'm not sure myself. You can play it that way if you want, though! And the underlying random generation technology got its origins in AHOGT, so it's part of a lineage certainly.

Q: Should I base my life and whole conception of self around these randomly generated cards?

A. It makes about as much sense as a Myers-Briggs test so yeah go for it. Surrealist methodologies ftw.

StatusPrototype
PlatformsHTML5
Rating
Rated 4.6 out of 5 stars
(10 total ratings)
AuthorSam Keeper
GenreInteractive Fiction
Made withbitsy
Tags2D, Bitsy, Creepy, Experimental, Procedural Generation, PROCJAM, Retro, Tarot

Comments

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Very interesting! I would actually love to see those cards in Bitsy aesthetics, even though I guess relaying on text descriptions is more... umm... it makes me a smarter dude, right?

Mostly I just couldn't figure out how I'd do pop up imagery within the system haha. Though I might be able to have a separate popup div display the cards... I'll have to give it some thought!

How many cards there are actually discussed in the game? Can you list them? Any link to description base?

there's 22 cards (I think) in final build... if you poke through the source code by inspecting the game element, you can find a script tag with the RANDOMGEN id, and in the dict.card object you can see them all. Some of them are generative, so like The Moon card actually calls out to the {moongen] function and you can see how it's put together. for cards like that there's no "stable" description cause it can switch between a bunch of alternate moon states. a few other cards are like that--like The Armory pulls randomly from the [weapon] corpus three times for its description. but yeah that's where at least the skeleton of the different cards is set

I could post that code here but it might get a bit messy since it doesn't look like itchio has a way of posting code blocks...

Alright then, thanks anyway.

Love the atmosphere and style!

Thanks!

This was pretty neat, although finding where I was on the screen was almost never easy, especially when going through the double door that leads to the thing that talks like a Ram Dass book (I got stuck going back and forth through it for a while). The concept of procedurally-generated tarot cards is pretty cool. 

Thank you, glad you found your way eventuall