Hoo?
Hoo? is a browser-playable solo journaling tarot RPG based on Anamnesis. It was created for the Anamnesis Jam.
As you progress through the four main chapters of Hoo?, you will use the imagery and descriptions of the tarot deck to answer questions about your character to build up a story of your past. Finally, in the fifth chapter, you will choose a card from the Major Arcana to represent your character's present and complete your story.
Art
This game contains quite a few original works of art including a full 78 card tarot deck: the Hoo? Deck with full text descriptions of the cards, traditional meanings and amusing modern meanings.
You can read more about the creation of the deck on my website:
Create your story!
A printable HTML summary at the end of the game gives you the complete transcript of your answers divided into chapters appropriate for printing and pinning on your fridge at home.
In addition to being fun for its own sake, the story you create could also be the back-story for a character in a table-top RPG game or any kind of fiction story. (Wow, now you can get to that novel you've always been meaning to write!)
A note on save/resume
Though the idea is to play straight through, Hoo? attempts to save and resume at any point to survive a browser refresh or even a re-visit days later. The game always resumes at the start of a "chapter".
(It may appear that you need to draw some prompt inspiration cards again, but do not be alarmed. The original prompt question and your answer will re-appear for editing once you reach the text entry area.)
Colophon
All artwork was drawn in Krita with a decade-old Wacom Intuos drawing tablet. The art took about two months to create. The game itself took several weeks.
This game was written in Vim from a blank file using nothing but HTML and JavaScript (no frameworks or libraries). It ended up a bit of a rat's nest as the deadline loomed and there are certainly some things I would do differently if I were to start it again. Feel free to view the source (a single index.html file) to see how it's made. Save/resume uses the browser's localStorage.
In addition to the entire concept, the question prompts for the minor arcana chapters were taken (and then tweaked) from the original Anamnesis (CC BY 4.0).
Development log
- UPDATE: Added minor arcana prompt card to displayFeb 10, 2023
- v1.1 - A major bug fix already :-(Feb 02, 2023
Comments
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Is there a way to get full screen, I want to be IMMERSED!
That's a good question, thanks! I created the game itself with an extremely small fixed width and height as a way to cut down on the tight development time. (Resizeable layouts being a huge time sink to get right.)
For kind of a "retro feel" (meaning the images will get bigger, but pixelated):
You can right-click in the game area (it's an <iframe>) and "Open frame in new tab" or "Open frame in new window" - in Firefox's wording and other browsers should have similar options.
That gives you a nice clean window, but doesn't make the game any larger. *Then* you can use the browser to "zoom in" to fill the screen with the game.
It's a pretty lame hack, but might give you a bit of that immersive feeling?
Really nice game. I meant to embody a character and ended up just kinda reflecting on myself. It was a very calming time, and it let me explore things I probably haven't thought about enough. Plus the art was 10/10 and the card descriptions and meanings where very lovely. All around a very nice little game <3
I really appreciate this, thank you!
hey this is truly gorgeous. it touched me a lot more than i expected, and i ended up with a personal journalling session but can absolutely see this being very fun to do for fiction as well!
the experience of using it was a delight and kept me engrossed through the whole playthrough, to the point where i fully didn't notice the tiny minor arcana on the response pages until i saw your update in the devlog! i was confused about that in the printout too because i expected the major arcana to show up rather than the minor, but it was honestly a pretty fun memory challenge to go back and write down which major arcana prompted each of my responses.
i wish I had the whole deck with so i could read through all the delightful descriptions and interpretations, the art and everything is amazing and has such a great vibe. if you ever put up just the deck and interpretations here on itch i would buy it in a heartbeat.
Oh wow, thank you, I really appreciate it! Hmmm, I wonder if a PDF booklet would make sense? I've often wished I'd done the drawings at a higher resolution to make sense as a printed deck. But maybe in a little booklet along with the descriptions, the smaller images wouldn't be such a liability?
a little pdf booklet sounds great!
Absolutely gorgeous deck! I love how smoothly I progress through the story in a browser - not having to flip through to oracle prompts and card meanings kept me immersed deep in the feel of my story. In the swords chapter I pulled the 7, 10 and 3 and OUF I felt that. Great work!
Thank you so much! I'm really happy to hear that you were able to get into the story creation using Hoo! (I would have written Hoo?!, but then it looks like I can't believe it. Ha ha.)
This is super cool, love seeing a game about the Tarot!
Thank you!