Divinlog no. 1: how I decided to take a complicated idea and make it even more complicated, for reasons :)
Hi, welcome to the first entry of my Divinlog series! It's devlogs for my upcoming tarot music game Divinuet. Isn't that fun?
In late 2016 and early 2017, I was in a rough patch. I was underemployed in a fairly expensive city (Austin, Texas). I was living in an apartment that got very little natural light. It was part of a giant, depressing complex with several buildings surrounding a massive parking lot. I didn’t have many local friends. Also, some stuff was happening with the government, stuff that feels eerily relevant right now...
But I was newly living with my then-boyfriend (now-husband) Alex, and our apartment did have a cute little balcony that Ramona loved. So it wasn't ALL bad.
At some point during that period, I started hearing about people using tarot for self-reflection and insight. This surprised me. Previously I had thought of tarot the same way I thought of psychic hotlines: people pretending to have divination powers in order to exploit emotionally vulnerable people.
But I was intrigued by this idea of a method of self-discovery that I hadn't tried yet. I'm conceited, y'all. I love learning about myself. And maybe the cards would have some ideas of how to get myself out of this rut. So I bought a deck.
I remember going through the deck card by card when it first arrived, blown away by all the little intricacies in Pamela Colman Smith's art. As I learned the meanings of the cards and how to do spreads, I felt like I really was discovering how to use an incredibly powerful tool. I became obsessed with learning as much as I could about tarot.
Of course I pretty much immediately started thinking of music in connection to tarot. How could I not? I am a composer, after all. The idea to compose themes for the cards came to me pretty quickly.
Could I do an album? There are 78 cards, so that'd be far too many tracks for an album. Pick just my favorite cards? No, I didn't want to leave any out. A series of albums? That'd be a lot of releases. People might get bored.
This idea marinated in the back of my mind for a few years. My tarot deck collection quickly grew. Alex and I moved to LA and got married. My composing career finally started to pick up. And in January 2019 I released my first interactive music experience, inter-view.
I really enjoyed making the game. I had originally just meant to make a small demo to show I knew how to use Wwise and compose interactive music, but with the help of some very talented friends, I turned it into a full game. It was really rewarding. I wanted to do it again.
The idea for the next game came to me not long after I released inter-view. Of course! The tarot themes! I could compose all 78, save myself some work by keeping them shorter than typical album tracks, and present them in a way that felt far more compelling than just releasing music.
I could also do more than just the themes! I could have the cards work together to create music based on their combined meanings. After all, a tarot reading is so much more than just the sum of its parts. The overall story matters just as much, if not more so, than the individual card meanings.
So there it was. My game idea was born.
