A Tarot Reading

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.