Divinlog no. 3: on making a not-quite-game
This is part of my series of devlogs about my upcoming tarot music game Divinuet. Read them all here!
I had a conversation with some friends recently that got me thinking about what exactly Divinuet is. Is it a game? I guess it depends how you define it. It is a thing that looks and feels a lot like a video game, except there's no win state or anything, and there are no real goals to accomplish other than listening to the music.
I'd been thinking it might fall into the category of something like Tiny Glade or Townscaper, which are both city/town builders with no real objectives or gameplay other than just seeing what you can build. But those games give you a ton of freedom in that they kind of let you create whatever you want. Divinuet is much more structured. There's a specific experience I want the player to have with each reading.
Maybe it's just an album with extra steps? After all, it really is mainly about the player listening to music I created. That feels too simplistic, though. There's a lot more happening than just music.
Maybe it would be best described as a sort of virtual tarot/music performance. When I was conceiving of the game, imagery kept popping into my head of someone getting a tarot reading on a stage, with some kind of chamber ensemble behind them improvising music to accompany the reading. That's essentially what Divinuet is doing, except the ensemble is Wwise and the stage is your computer.
Ultimately, this doesn't really matter. Usually I switch between calling it a game and an interactive experience. Saying it's a game feels less nebulous, and so far nobody has yelled at me for calling it one, so I will probably just keep doing so.
But know this! Divinuet is a game, but it's also a virtual tarot/music performance. It's an interactive experience. It's a tarot music video computer program thingy. You can't win, there are no points, you can't be good or bad at it. But you can play around with it as much as you want. You can experiment with all different combinations and orders of cards and therefore have so, so many different musical experiences. The possibilities are infinite!
Okay, that was a lie. There's actually a finite number of possible 3-card tarot readings. But that number is 456,456.
Ultimately, I'm really enjoying making something that doesn't fit neatly into a category or specific box. I don't have to worry so much about conventions or what people are expecting, because there really isn't a template for something like Divinuet. I'm simply making a thing to celebrate my love of tarot and interactive music.