heyo! It's been about six months already (yikes!) since the Anamnesis Jam, and I'm finally getting around to writing this dev log -- chatting process is one of my favorite things, and so I wanted to take a minute and share some of the discoveries and challenges that came up in creating my entry, OBLIVION:

• Anamnesis has such a clear, compelling narrative arc, and so my first instinct was just to turn it inside out. What about starting at the end, with Wands, and finishing with Pentacles? What about starting with too much information, and ending with none? (Some early ideas that didn't make the cut were a spy destroying evidence and a robot about to wipe their drives clean -- and fwiw, I still really like these ideas! But one of my favorite things about Anamnesis is its expansive approach to genre, and these ideas felt like they narrowed down player choice in a way that was just less interesting to me to explore this time around).
• Once I settled on the parasite idea and started tweaking mechanics to set up Anamnesis' arc in reverse, I realized you could  technically play both games in a connected cycle without breaking any already-established canon in either game. I love this kind of discovery in a creative process, where earlier decisions kind of end up making resonant choices for you later on. It felt like a fun and unusual way to be in conversation with the original, and so I decided to formalize it as an optional mode of play.
• On that note, one of my favorite design challenges was how Sam's design so beautifully physicalizes the game's arc, the player's empty journal slowly filling with impressions, details, and meaning in parallel with their character gaining a fuller sense of self. I briefly thought about asking the player to do more robust preparation before starting to draw tarot cards, but that quickly fizzled -- it just dampened any of the fun of discovery, like asking somebody to throw their own surprise party. I think balance of "prep" to "gameplay" is a really fascinating challenge for any kind of TTRPG design, but especially with how "prep" becomes a much more prominent part of the "gameplay" experience for solo games and other DM-less forms. (Everything's in quotation marks because honestly, I don't personally find distinguishing between the two super helpful in this context? From my perspective, the moment someone picks up a copy of the rules, gameplay is technically already in motion -- but more on that another time). I think the solution I settled on gets pretty close to successfully inverting Sam's original mechanic, but if you've played OBLIVION I'd love to hear what you think. :)

Overall this was such a fun process, and it's been so cool to see the wild and wonderful variety of projects folks submitted! I definitely want to explore making solo journaling games more in the future -- more soon!

:) dk