• Expanded and updated discussion of each design principle
• Updated tutorials, with focus on Unity and Fungus

I will be resurrecting this blog as my primary professional website and portfolio, since arcanaforge is now defunct. Arcana continues, but I needed to dissolve the associated LLC when I moved to the UK.

Keep an eye on this space for more updates.

Arcana Knowledge Plane (Background and artifact art by Thomas Vanhuffel)

Jeepers.  After hundreds of hours of summer development, much of it full-time and often more than full-time, I appear to have a stable build of Arcana.  Not perfect by a longshot, but stable.  For those of you interested in the history of the project, I wrote a blog about that.  Tl;dr, I’ve been working on Arcana for 7+ years, with as many iterations of the project in different engines, with different teams and varying angles of attack.

For more detail, check out: my Youtube channel (with gameplay video, some of it narrated), my Twitter feed (with frequent, often daily progress reports), and the game’s Facebook page (an amalgamation of the two).  The game is also a practical manifestation of the theories and concepts in one of my books, Game Magic.

How do I know that this build is stable?  Well, I can now do the two things that I dreamed of doing for the last few years: by performing magic rituals, I can travel to the plane of Carcosa, and I can summon the King in Yellow from his dimension to our own.

Carcosa (Art by  Damian Fox and Thomas Vanhuffel)

But more than that: I can do both of these things emergently, as the result of an underlying spatial logic consisting of an invisible n-dimensional maze of alternate planes of existence, the walls of which form barriers that players must circumvent or break through to perform astral projections and summonings.

There are no pre-scripted rituals in Arcana, but nor are the rituals random or procedurally generated (yet).  Each ritual action (lighting a candle, filling a cup, ringing a bell, placing an object in the temple) has an effect on the state of the ritual and the movement through the metaversal maze.  A ritual is a combination of actions that allows a player to perform a desired operation in the metaverse, and many combinations of actions can lead to similar results, as well as entirely unexpected outcomes.  The workings of magic are, after all, mysterious and hidden (the meaning of the word “occult,” as referenced in Howard’s Law of Occult Game Design, formulated in my 2014 GDC Online talk and published in the book 100 Principles of Game Design).  Players will never see the metaverse, but only learn of its structure through indirect audio and visual feedback.   However, there will be a toolset portion of Arcana (a level editor, akin to a Minecraft of Ritual Magic) that designers can use to create their own rituals and the underlying n-dimensional mazes that give them structure.

So, in the process of reaching Carcosa or summoning the King, players might take an unexpected detour through heavens, hells, and surreal mindscapes that weave in and out of various mythologies and cosmologies.  In the process of summoning the King, players might inadvertently hook and reel in all manner of planar flotsam and jetsam.  I liken the game’s core gameplay modes to astral bungee-jumping, astral bass fishing, and (eventually, in a later build) astral Simon.

There is a passage in Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone, in which Elric makes elaborate ritual preparation to navigate an astral maze in order to summon his patron, the Chaos god Arioch, who returns to the mortal plane in the form of a fly.  That’s the core experience of Arcana.  An acid trip astral projection and summoning simulator in which players perform rituals to explore alternate realms of existence, gain otherworldly objects of power, and communicate with spirits and gods.

The progress over this summer would have been impossible without the creativity and diligent work of several team members past and present: Thomas Vanhuffel (lead artist), Damian Fox (who drew Carcosa, the King, and several artifacts), Steve Graham (lead programmer), and Scott Graham (programmer and design consultant).   Gene Semel is hard at work on audio for the game that will take its atmosphere to the next level.  Thanks to all these individuals for their work!

I plan to start a little bit of very focused testing and QA among a small group of friends, family, and those willing to put up with the many rough edges of an early prototype.  If you happen to be at Pacifica University on July 16, or at the Twin Peaks Festival July 22-24th, I’d love for you to try it out.

For front-end progress, I am now working with an excellent artist, Thomas Vanhuffel, whose portfolio can be seen here: http://weenog.deviantart.com/ His many atmospheric art assets will be discussed in another blog entry:

For back-end progress, we are now extending physics calculations for n-dimensional metaspace.  Scott Graham, one of the coders on the project, brings to bear his advanced background in theoretical physics on this aspect of the project.  Meanwhile, Steve Graham continues to implement portions of these ideas in code, with help from me in prioritizing, carrying forward, and debugging the code.

The main idea is that for every visible ritual action performed by players, there are behind-the-scenes calculations of movement in a metaspace of infinite dimensions. So, when objects come into view or planes appear, this is because those objects are nearby based on mathematical calculations (specifically, the sum of all the distances across dimensions).

To accomplish a simulation of 6-dimensional physics, we create two 3-dimensional projections, i.e. abstracted representations of part of the metaspace showing only some of its axes (in this case, three at a time).  We call these zones metaprojection zones and have named them, respectively, the Shadow and the Umbra.  These two areas resemble shadowboxes located behind the main 2d interface area in which the player performs rituals.   Here is a screenshot of both views of the game (2d player view and both 3-dimensional projection zones).

By tapping into Unity’s built-in physics system (and extending it past 3 dimensions), we can potentially implement all sorts of interesting gameplay effects, like rituals that make players move faster in metaspace, or barriers that bar players’ progress while astrally projecting. And working around those barriers (or breaking through them) gives an underlying logic to rituals that is emergent rather than just a sequence of actions.

For example, the player hits a barrier at +50 death, so they take a diversionary route along the pleasure axis: +20 pleasure.  Here, they are confronted with a barrier of infinite extent along the pleasure axis, so they chant repeatedly to build up sufficient ritual force to break through the barrier.  The player doesn’t necessarily know that they are navigating a maze with invisible walls: the player just observes that certain actions result in blockages, whereas others result in progress.

This video gives a glimpse into the interaction of the front end interface for performing rituals and the back end systems governing ritual logic: two meta projection zones (shadow and umbra) containing the two astral doubles of every ritual object.  In this footage, the player performs a ritual to project his shadow body (a cube) outward through metaspace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf431VMBtjY

The best visual equivalent I can think of is Steve Ditko’s Dr. Strange illustrations, which suggest a Dali-influenced, wormhole-permeated, non-Euclidean maze of portals and passageways.

Speaking of visuals, Thomas Vanhuffel has been creating beautiful, atmospheric paintings of the various planes.  Not to be confused with the back-end mathematical dimensions (which represent continuous movement along axes), Vanhuffel’s planar backgrounds show particular realms of existence at the extremes of these axes: pure, Platonic abstractions of extreme Death, Life, Pain, Pleasure, Chaos, Order, Evil, Good, Ignorance, Knowledge, Illusion, and Reality.

The next blog entry will show off many of Thomas’ excellent paintings, but here is a tease of two current images, showing both planar backgrounds (pleasure and knowledge) as well as mockup of the surrounding interface.

Over the summer, I have been working with fiery passion on my game project, Arcana and its associated editor, the Arcana Ritual Toolset.  Arcana is a twofold project: a) a game meant to simulate a rich experience of magic by allowing players to perform rituals and b) an editor that allows developers to build their own rituals for players to perform.  Arcana has been in development in various iterations for the last seven years, including two years in which I worked with students.  The game is the practical fulfillment of the theoretical principles about how to make better videogame magic systems described in my book, Game Magic: A Designer’s Guide to Magic Systems in Theory and Practice. This summer, I’ve been carrying forward the work, with the help of three collaborators: Steve Graham, Scott Graham, and Damian Fox.  What follows is a summary of the project’s evolution over the summer.  The Youtube links lead to game footage at the various stages of the project’s development described in the blog.

I began work on Arcana this summer with a simple task: to cause a card, representing a ritual object, to fade in and out through moving a slider.  (The card was Anubis, the Egyptian god of Death).  The fading of the card was meant to simulate the movement through a multi-dimensional space, i.e. astral projection, as well as summoning extra-planar beings to this world, i.e. invocation/evocation.  I made the card into a GUI image, then accessed the alpha channel of its canvas renderer and tied this variable to a slider.  I then constructed six sliders to represent six major dimensions that could be traveled, increased, or decreased through rituals: life/death, good/evil, order/chaos, pleasure/pain, knowledge/ignorance, and reality/illusion.  By moving each of these sliders, a particular tarot card (drawn by Damian Fox) could fade in and out (e.g. the Anubis card would become clearer and more solid as death increased).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrucJIHcsVs

At this stage, I also experimented with creating some simple ritual actions, such as chanting and lighting candles, though they did not initially relate to any underlying model of ritual logic.

Once I had these six sliders, Scott Graham (whose background is in physics and computer science) provided me with a mathematical function to calculate “taxi distance” in six-dimensional space, which involved taking the sum of the absolute value of each difference along a given dimension.  I faded the alpha channel of the canvas renderer of each card based on the multi-dimensional distance equation after I had translated it into Unity’s mathematical functions via C#.

Based on an inspiration in a half-waking state one night, I eventually arranged the six sliders, and two more form Time and Space, along the spokes of the eight-pointed star of chaos, in reference both to the arms of the sorcerer-king Elric’s patron chaos deity, as well as to the paradigms or perspectives of sorcery used in chaos magic.   The sliders then ceased to function as sliders per se, but as gauges (analogous to health bars) of the various planar vector variables.  The chaos star is an interdimensional compass rose visually representing the player’s position in multidimensional space.  Because the sliders were now dimensional gauges, buttons on the right-hand side of the screen caused movement along a given vector.  In keeping with chaos magic tradition, I gave each vector on the star a symbolic set of colors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfX1-lxegTA

This scene and its associated functions represented the Editor Mode of Arcana, to be used by developers, as implied by the name “Arcana Ritual Toolset.”  I then set to work on a game mode to be experienced by players.  I initially began with six planar background screens that would be loaded if the player pressed a particular button. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqLjTqq0kwo

I then began to work on basic ritual actions.  At Steve Graham’s suggestion, I wrote up several example rituals of the sort that I would want players to experience.  I noticed that a recurrent pattern in these rituals was placing a ritual object onto a consecrated space (called a ritual location): candles onto a pentagram, skulls onto an altar, coins onto a tombstone.  Accordingly, I worked on basic drag-and-drop functionality using an official Unity example.  Dropping a coin onto a tombstone would then cause a ghost sprite to appear. (The fictional premise is summoning a ghost by offering a coin called an Obolus to Charon the Boatman.  Influence of both Huck Finn and Wraith: The Oblivion are at work here).  At first, the ghost’s appearance was binary (either completely invisible or completely visible).  Using the multi-dimensional distance function, I then tied the ghost’s alpha channel to the underlying death variable, which could be incremented by placing the coin on the tombstone.  To simulate this ritual logic, I wrote a function called DeathShift() that would increment the death variable whenever the player put a coin onto a tombstone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aHM1lA1wrM

I then wrote code to retrieve the name of both the dropped item, called the ritual object in the language of our development team, and the consecrated space, called a ritual location.  I slowly elaborated and built upon the tombstone ritual by creating a second ritual location (a tombstone) and a second ritual object (the flower).  By retrieving the names of ritual objects and ritual locations, I could increment different variables.

I then elaborated and generalized this ritual logic by writing functions to increment all of the variables, initially incrementing a given vector variable by 1 at a time.  (Later, I also wrote functions to increment the vector variables by 0.1, since float values map more easily onto an alpha channel that runs from 0 to 1).  I also wrote a more generalized and sophisticated planar distance function that measures the multidimensional distance between the player and ritual cards.  In order to make this function work, I attached a planarlocus script to each card to define its location in metaphysical space (referred to by my team as the metaspace).  I also wrote distance functions manually to calculate the distance between player and every single ritual card individually.  (It was only later that I learned the concept of functional abstraction, allowing me to parameterize the functions DeathShift(), which shifts the player 1 unit on the death vector, and MinorDeathShift(), which shifts the player 0.1 units, into a single function: DeathShift(n).  A further layer of abstraction is planned, in which a PlanarShift(v) function is passed an entire six-dimensional vector.  The advantage of this type of functional abstraction is concision: accomplishing the work of 200 lines of code in 1 line.  At the time I was writing the distance functions, however, I was typing each individual line, which required great care, time, and double-checking when code didn’t compile or do what I expected.

Eventually, I imported all the card art produced by Damian Fox (as well as students Greg Roling and Matt Nelles), allowing me to build several rituals, including a ritual to travel to Carcosa by placing the King in Yellow’s mask, robe, and book onto a black star and an altar.  These details allude to the King in Yellow mythos of Robert W. Chambers, recently popularized by the TV show True Detective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljYbk-EvQxk

While expanding the rituals, I also collected six planar backgrounds to represent particular planes, such as a giant chaos star for the Chaos plane and a macabre art nouveau piece called Demiurge by Anastasia Inspiderwiht to represent the plane of Ignorance.  I adapted the multi-dimensional distance function to switch backgrounds using Sorting Order, so that planes become discrete boundaries between dimensions that change abruptly at a given threshold and stay fully opaque while the objects associated with that plane shift in and out.

I also separated all the images from their associated cards in order to be able to use the card images as sprites for ritual objects.

Once mathematical functions were in place to increment and decrement variables, I added greater variety to rituals by developing ritual actions beyond simply placing ritual objects.  Each new ritual action mathematically affects the underlying vector mathematics.  Ringing a bell calls a Purify() function that sets all dimensional vectors to 0 (useful if one has made a mistake in a ritual, or if one changes one’s mind).  Lighting a candle adds 1 to all dimensional variables.  Chanting squares all variables.  Each ritual action also has associated multimodal feedback, including a temple bell sound from Kyoto, Tibetan throat singing, and the sound of a candle being lit and snuffed.  I’m especially proud of the hourglass action.  Pressing the hourglass button temporarily boosts all vectors, fires an animation of the hourglass turning over, starts a sand sound, and then re-sets all vectors when the sand runs out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxOFmpikO08

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxOFmpikO08

I then began work on creating an inventory system in order for the player to be able to carry ritual objects.  I used the Inventory Master asset from the Unity store, and I spent several days re-building my Arcana ritual engine in order to work in conjunction with the new asset.

I also spent several days experimenting with object instantiation in order to be able to drop a 2d object into the scene (something not anticipated by the Inventory Master).  Using several AddComponent() functions to add colliders, pickup scripts, and other needed parts to dropped objects, I can now pick up dropped objects and put them in an inventory.

These features pave the way for a planar scavenger hunt: an astral projection adventure in metaspace searching for ritual objects.  With luck, the planar scavenger hunt will be a small playable demo: a few minutes of rough gameplay designed to convey the overall idea of Arcana in game mode.

In one of the most haunting lines from Clive Barker’s film Lord of Illusions, a high-ranking member of an elite illusionists’ club observes that “we walk a narrow line between trickery and divinity.”  The character is alluding to the two meanings of the word “magician,” which can connote both sorcerer (who commands supernatural forces) and an illusionist (who performs tricks that create a false appearance of the supernatural).   The slipperiness of these two meanings pervades Lord of Illusions, in which a stage magician’s tricks are fueled by actual supernatural magic, culminating in an apocalyptic confrontation between an illusionist with mystical powers and a false god using the supernatural for illusory ends.

This conflict and synergy between illusion and mysticism is explored even more deeply in “The War of Illusion,” a section of the masterful Fallen London, a browser-based branching narrative game about a Gothic Victorian underworld.   In this narrative, the player gradually uncovers a feud between two factions: Shroud and Glass.  On the surface, Shroud consists of mediums engaging in authentic seances with spirits, while Glass is comprised of illusionists who cunningly wield smoke and mirrors.  Except . .  . this divide is gradually revealed to be simplistic, if not utterly backwards.  As the player is initiated into one or both of the factions, she gradually realizes that the two group’s methods and philosophies are actually the reverse of what they initially seemed to be: the Shroud relies on chicanery to create the appearance of communicating with the Beyond, while the apparent specular illusions of Glass actually rely on mirrors as portals into a numinous jungle dimension ruled over by serpentine Fingerkings.  (In an example of Fallen London’s involuted and exquisite connectedness, the mirror realm is linked to other examples of lore experienced in separate storylets: the land of the Fingerkings is the same as the Mirror-Marches, the first place into which an insane player is exiled, which is also intimated to be the origin of the dreams experienced during honey-drenched hallucinations.  The Fingerwork of the Clay Men, glimpsed behind mirrors, is also connected to the Fingerkings.  This type of lateral connection between seemingly discrete lore fragments is the meaning of world-building cohesion, which is a spatial metaphor for the interlocking puzzle pieces that is deeper and richer than the temporal and logical sequentiality of plot).

In walking and criss-crossing over the thin line between genuine sorcery and fakery, Fallen London showcases the performative nature of all magic: occultists and prestidigitators alike stage theatrical extravaganzas that create experiences of the supernatural in the minds of an audience.  If spirits are ideas (in the Platonic and/or neurological sense of the word), then the ultimate metaphysical origin of these ideas is irrelevant as long as they are experienced by an audience (bearing in mind that the magician herself can be the foremost member of her own audience).  Sorcery is legerdemain and prestidigitation, both etymologically derived from words for feats of manual dexterity: light hands and quick digits.  The Magician with his ceremonial implements in the nineteenth century mystical Rider-Waite tarot deck is Le Bateleur (the Juggler) in the medieval Marseilles deck: a mountebank whose ritual artifacts are the balls and cups of a shell game.

Fallen London is, of course, not the only medium to explore the ambiguities and paradoxical slippages of magic.  Christopher Nolan’s Prestige derives its haunting poignancy from the line between illusion and inspired invention.  Similar ideas smoulder behind the most striking image from NBC’s tv show Constantine, in which the eponymous anti-hero douses his hands in lighter fluid and sets them ablaze in order to ward off a gang of voodoo thugs.  Constantine, ironically reprimanded by a demon because his rituals “lack the power of intention,” can perform actual feats of goetic magic and exorcism but stages a trick for the thugs because, under the circumstances, the fakery is quicker and more impactful than the real thing.  Constantine, standing with arms in cruciform posture and a blazing orb of flame on each palm, is a con man cutting the figure of the quintessential sorcerer, but also a genuine sorcerer pretending to be a con man.  What does the distinction between pyrotechnics and pyromancy matter if both can temporarily keep the demons at bay?

About a year ago, I started wearing a chaos star.  While there is a real-life school of occultism that adopted this star as its emblem, and while I am a real-life occult game designer, I don’t consider myself primarily a practitioner of Chaos Magick as defined by Peter Carroll and his followers.

A little historical background is in order.

The chaos star first appears in Jim Cawthorne’s illustration of the Heraldic Arms of Chaos in one of Michael Moorcock’s stories about Elric, a doomed albino sorcerer with a sentient, vampiric sword.  As Moorcock tells the story, he conceived of the Arms of Law as a single arrow to represent a unitary, straight and narrow path.  In contrast, the eight arrows of chaos radiate outward in all directions, representing the multiple possible paths of art.

I have long admired Moorcock’s intricate cosmology: a labyrinthine multiverse through which a cursed Eternal Champion reincarnates, reflected and refracted as if through the faces of a shattered prism.  In my book, Game Magic, I argue that the fusion of goetia and astral projection by which Elric summons his patron, the Chaos Lord Arioch, is the finest example of ritual magic upon which a game designer might draw for inspiration.  As my Arcana game progresses, summoning and astral projection are becoming the two central aspects of magic in both the mechanical and narrative senses.

But I truly became enamored with the Chaos star while playing Zangband, a classic roguelike (with ASCII characters and permadeath), set in the fantasy world of Roger Zelazny’s Amber (itself a powerful influence on Moorcock’s multiverse).

In Zangband, there are many character classes, but the one I found myself irresistibly drawn toward was the Chaos Knight.  The character is a practical starting class with tangible benefits (such as a beginning the game equipped with plate armor, a longsword, and a powerful complement of damage spells), but the class has one powerful quirk that drew me onward.  At character generation, the character is assigned a Chaos Patron (the names of which, such as Pyaray, Chardros, Arioch, and Xiombarg, are taken from Moorcock rather than Zelazny).  Every time the character levels up, the voice of the Chaos Patron booms out, conferring a randomly chosen boon.  These boons run the gamut from mildly useful to lifesaving to downright disastrous.  The Patron might fill the hallway in front of the player with enemies, give the player a hideous and crippling mutation, drop a powerful sword in front of the player, or heal the player of all wounds.  In a genre already built around coping with (and possibly savoring) contingency through randomly generated levels, the leveling up mechanic associated with the Chaos Knight compounds chaos recursively.

And I loved it.  At the time that I was playing Zangband, I was faced with a lot of contingency: myriad uncertainty related to aspects of life I couldn’t control.  Rather than see this chaos as a hindrance, playing a Chaos Knight helped me learn to embrace this chaos as a source of energy.  Because, as occultist Ramsey Dukes and (more recently) TV’s version of John Constantine remind us, we all make deals with forces beyond ourselves just to function on a daily level.

Everything I needed to know about life I learned from Elric.  All Patrons are Chaos Patrons. I wear a Chaos star because I learned to revel in this uncertainty.  Blood and Souls for My Lord Arioch . . .

I want to market Arcana like Iron Maiden.

No, let me rephrase that.

I want to market Arcana like motherfucking Iron Maiden.  

A little context is in order here.

As preparations for the Arcana Kickstarter gather steam (especially in terms of art direction), I find myself thinking about the relationship between marketing and world-building in musical-visual settings.  I’ve also been watching Iron Maiden documentaries, especially those that feature interviews with frontman Bruce Dickinson (who also happens to be a professional airline pilot, manning the controls of the band’s touring jet called Flight 666 and Ed Force One).

Iron Maiden is a glorious juggernaut of a marketing machine, starting with a foundation of solid songwriting and musicianship that combines with visually harmonious cover art to create a world.  And this audio-visual world sells concerts, t-shirts, bandanas, posters, and countless other knick-knacks in a way that most bands can only dream of.  It is telling that even Kiss, themselves masters of theatrical marketing, expressed a certain awe of the early Iron Maiden’s capacity for merchandising.

And none of this clever capitalism seems particularly crass to me, since at its heart it is based on a cohesive vision of the imaginative world to which the band gives access.   From the beginning, Maiden recruited cover artist Derek Riggs to paint gorgeous, dystopian settings in which the band’s mascot, Eddie the Head, could wreck his mayhem.  And these covers don’t merely supplement the songs: they are an extension of the world created by these songs, rich with detail that can be pondered lovingly while immersing oneself in the Egyptology of “Powerslave,” the pulp diabolism of “Number of the Beast,” or the cybernetic time travel of “Somewhere in Time.”

It’s not surprising, then, that Iron Maiden commissioned a video game, wryly titled Ed Hunter, that allowed players to explore the worlds depicted in these album covers as immersive three-dimensional environments.

Creativity meets marketing at the same crossroads where audio, visuals, and interactivity intersect.  I’m reminded of the two most beautiful pieces of Dark Souls merchandise: unofficial and unlicensed recreations of boss battles in the rough, retro, Gothic style of 80′s heavy metal t-shirts.   These fan creations seem to speak, saying “This is what it sounds like to live inside of Dark Souls, and this is how that sound looks.”  Such audio-visual echoes are at the heart of what is sometimes called transmedia, but with an authenticity that starts with a core vision and markets *around* this vision (rather than the opposite, exploitative approach often favored by Hollywood, which has sometimes besmirched the concept of transmedia).

In a short documentary piece on “Faith and Music,” Bruce Dickinson speaks of his inspiration by the sacred and the demonic, set to the tune of his own musical rendition of William Blake’s “Jersualem” in the background.  And all this spiritual discourse strikes me as perfectly in keeping with the marketing machine that is Maiden, because Blake found himself in an eighteenth-century version of the same conundrum.  In his tiny printer’s cottage in Felpham, Blake sought to give verbal and visual expression to his own unique vision in a way that would be true to his spirit, while attracting enough of an audience to keep his shop running and his body alive.  Blake didn’t own or pilot a jumbo jet, but his imagination soared, and one could easily imagine him launching his own Kickstarter “in the infernal method” if a wrinkle in time allowed him to travel from his era to our own.

What I want from Arcana is a vision sufficiently striking and appealing to our intended audience of gamers, occultists, and metalheads that our Kickstarter rewards aren’t just supplementary trinkets, but natural extensions of a gorgeous, Gothic world.

I shall not cease from mental fight, nor shall my sword sleep in my hands, till we have built Arcana in South Dakota’s frozen lands.

(Up the Irons!)

But, for me, the theatrical metaphor is most useful as a guide for practical design decisions.  In every iteration of the toolset, users have consistently asked whether they would be able to perform rituals in different environments.  The answer was usually that we had deliberately restricted the Toolset (and the Simulator that proceeded it) to a one-room temple in order to limit the 3d assets required.  As it turns out, making that one room appear atmospheric and beautiful involved months of work by lead 3d artist  environmental Landon Anker, who labored to create a neo-Gothic cathedral with normal maps that represented rich wood textures and an inlaid kabbalistic tree of life.

3d Arcana environmental art by Landon Anker

But the user desire to have many different ritual backdrops is a valid and understandable one.  Being stuck in a neo-Gothic cathedral, however beautiful, tends to restrict the imagination toward a single kind of magic (such as the Golden Dawn-style magic of the Arcana Ceremonial Magick Simulator).   Patterns of thought are promoted not just by gene or meme, but by the scene.  We perform druidic magic in an oaken grove, summon Bloody Mary in a bathroom mirror, and call Papa Legba at a crossroads.

But how to allow this switching of environment without dooming oneself to scads of 3d art and associated textures, thereby driving up an already stretched budget to unreasonable levels?

Cue the theater metaphor.  The idea of a theatrical set is to create a sense of place (with associated mood and atmosphere) with the minimum of effort and expense.   Sets are also built to be easily switchable for scene changes.  Set designers have all sorts of tricks for this, but a common one is to use flat, painted backdrops to stand in for three dimensional objects like clouds or trees.  Some clever designers even use a scrim, which refers to a thin curtain that is opaque when lit from one side but translucent when lit from another, so that through a change in lighting new objects will be revealed.  (The background painters of Disney’s original Haunted Mansion used this approach to reveal the silhouette of the Ghost Host hanging from the rafter in the stretching lobby that previously appeared to have a solid ceiling).

Applied to Arcana, the toolset could continue to take place in a one-room temple, but the walls of this temple could be beautifully painted two-dimensional textures representing different ritual environments (graveyards for necromancy, crossroads for voodoo, suburban bathrooms for Bloody Mary).  Realism is not the priority here.  Atmosphere is.

Claude Coats Haunted Mansion background painting

Moreover, switching between these textures/backgrounds/sets could be not just ancillary to the ritual, but a key result of a successful or failed ritual.  If the purpose of ritual is to alter inner and outer reality (which many magicians conceive of as the same thing, or at least two sides of the same coin), then the sign of a successful transformation would be an alteration of one’s environment.  Crowley calls this movement through the inner reaches of outer space “rising on the planes,” and the concept is familiar to shamans the world over.  The shaman, the walker between worlds, moves spiritually and psychologically but stays in the same place physically.

In Arcana, successfully performing a celestial ritual might switch the background scrim to a heavenly landscape, while botching such a ritual would change the set to an inferno.  In film, matte paintings using exploiting perspective are often used to create the illusion of a vast landscape, as in the Labyrinth of Hellraiser II.

The background set is part of a larger theatrical metaphor in the Arcana Ritual Toolset.  To quote the most recent iteration of the crowdfunding page, “The toolset consists of three parts: a selection of three-dimensional temple environments, a library of ritual artifacts, and a card-based visual programming language that allows you to implement ritual logic without ever typing a line of code.  To use a theatrical analogy, the temple environments are the sets (like a crossroads or a graveyard), the artifacts are the props, and the programming language is the script.   All of these parts come together to form the Ritual Toolset, implemented in the Unity game engine.”

I recently spent a week in Northwest Arkansas to visit family.   The region has changed a lot since I grew up there, and with a population of 500,000 it is now referred to as “the Northwest Arkansas Metropolitan Area,” a phrase I never expected to be applied to the isolated and rural region that I remember.

One highlight of my visit was a trip to the Northwest Arkansas Arkadia Retrocade, a vintage video arcade with more than 150 machines from gaming’s bygone days.  Every foot of the relatively small floorspace of the Retrocade (a former Chucky Cheese’s in a strip mall) is packed with games from the early 1980′s through the mid 1990′s.  It’s a scenario that triggers the fervor associated with novels like Lucky Wander Boy and Ready Player One!, both of which are love letters to the virtual and physical enchantments of entertainment that is perilously close to being lost outside of its native environment.

The best game that I played was Magic Sword, a side-scrolling, sword-and-sorcery themed beat ‘em up in which a barbarian warrior must ascend a fifty-story tower to defeat an evil wizard.  This scenario is deep, primal stuff: the ludic equivalent of Robert E. Howard’s Conan story “The Tower of the Elephant.”  When explored with sufficient gusto, the hoariest of fantasy cliches glow with enchantment, and these tropes only become cliches after first being represented with energy and originality.  It is this very energy that allow them to become cliches in the first place.

One such adventure cliche, which never loses its power for me, is gathering keys to unlock doors.  By collecting keys and unlocking doors in Magic Sword, the player acquires companions who fight alongside (or just behind) him, flinging missiles and magic in sync with the player’s attacks.  I like many things about the game: its bright, crisp pulp fiction aesthetic, its short but satisfying levels, its roster of fantasy archetype NPC’s, and most of all the forward momentum created by the text snippets that describe the tower.  There is a feeling of addictive discovery here, of exploration that lures despite or because of its linearity.  It’s no surprise that Magic Sword turns out to be the sequel to Black Tiger, the beloved, secret-brimming game of Ready Player One’s protagonist.

Magic Sword was part of a row of hack and slash beat ‘em ups that included Golden Axe, Astyanax, Willow, Altered Beast, and (sadly non-operational on the day that I visited) Ghosts and Goblins.   And, while the arcade contained many genres (racing games, shoot ‘em ups, several versions of Pac-Man), the row that contained Magic Sword captivated me.  Pacing up and down between each game a fervor that bordered on mania or sugar-induced ADHD, I jumped between each of these games, delighting the wealth of infinite continues (since the arcade charges only a $5 admission fee for unlimited free play).

And it struck me that these games, with their linear, pulpy premises and their adrenaline-fueled gameplay, have a quality often lacking in many contemporary games: atmosphere.  Unfettered by a need for realism or graphical fidelity or sophistication demanded by either current indie or AAA efforts, these games are unabashedly grim, spooky, and magical, like the cover of a vintage Weird Tales magazine or an Iron Maiden album over.  Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber didn’t have to ironize or apologize for the barbarians, sorcerers, and rogues in their stories, just as Magic Sword happily trots out ninjas, wizards, and lizard men with not an ounce of self-reflective shame.  Why are their ninjas in a fantasy tower?  Doesn’t matter.  What is my relationship to these characters?  Don’t care. Trailing a black-clad shinobi and a hooded sorcerer behind the player’s barbarian is exciting, like dangling a daisy-chain of archetypes.  Completely absent are the elaborate branching dialogues and nuanced intra-party romances with which RPG’s like Dragon Age are festooned.  NPC companions inevitably die after a few minutes, short-lived as goldfish, and one doesn’t have time or reason to mourn them.  Such is the fantastic brutality of a Conan story, in which the Cimmerian king’s companions are ad hoc and ephemeral.

There is a place in this world for ludo-narrative sophistication and complexity, which I strenuously advocate in other genres and contexts.  But there is also a place for rich, pulpy, sword-and-sorcery atmosphere.  And it’s that atmosphere that keeps me hunched over the screens of ancient and clunky handheld devices, playing endless iterations of Castlevania because almost nothing else in the vaguely contemporary gaming market quite scratches this pure, Gothic, medieval itch.   Wandering through the equally clunky, ancient machines of the Retrocade, I felt vindicated.  Each of these games resembles my beloved Castlevania in mood and gameplay, but each is also individual in setting and premise (resurrection in ancient Greece, time-traveling to fantasy Persia, clambering as Warwick Davis over treacherous cliffs). Here, standing six foot tall and glowing, were colossal machines whose entire purpose for existence was to munch quarters and ooze atmosphere.  And, just for today, they didn’t even need quarters.

I have played a lot of games this summer.  Here is a list of them along with brief commentary.

First, as an overview, the list:

• Dark Souls 2 (140 hours, finished)
• Thief Reboot (finished)
• Anna: Extended Edition (finished)
• Knock-Knock (finished)
• Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (finished)
• Mountain (finished)
• Catachresis (finished)
• Metal Gear Solid (2/3′s complete)
• Metal Gear Solid 2 (almost finished)
• Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance (3/4′s complete)
• Darksiders 2 (3/4′s complete)
• A Dark Room
• Frog Fractions
• Fallen London
• Ghost Rider (played the first two levels)
• Assassin’s Creed III (played the Kenway section and started Connor)
• Hitman 2: Silent Assassin (played two missions or so)
• Tenchu: Stealth Assassins (played a little bit)
• Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (played a few levels)
• Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin (played a few areas)

Dark Souls 2 (140 hours, finished): The Souls games are my favorite franchise, and I enjoyed Dark Souls 2 deeply, fervently . . . enough to play it for 140 hours, which translates into full-time play for a few weeks.   I think it’s a lesser accomplishment than the previous games, but that’s like saying that pure gold is less valuable than pure platinum. DS2 takes a maximalist approach, with more of everything than previous games spread out over a larger world.   But the metaphysical subtlety, narrative richness, and spatial density that were the hallmarks of the previous games have diminished along with the loss of Hidetaka Miyazaki as lead designer.  I liked Demon’s Souls better.  That said, I was deeply absorbed in Dark Souls 2, and its gorgeous Gothic art style, haunting music, and absorbing gameplay are still second to none.  In particular, I enjoyed the opportunity to be a Hexer: a warlock class that draws its power from the lower of the faith and intelligence stats, requiring the player to level up both values evenly.  This class had the perfect associated convenant: the Pilgrims of the Dark, a PvE covenant that privileges exploration of obscure nooks and crannies in hidden areas.  This sense of the hidden, far more than any clearly defined evil, is the meaning of the Dark in this world, and the simultaneous mechanical reliance on faith and intelligence thematically reflects the driving personality traits of an obsessed loremaster: the faith to be drawn to the metaphysical world of gods and covenants that may not exist, and the intelligence to explore them analytically.

Thief (reboot) (Finished):  I enjoyed Thief despite its mediocre reviews.  The game doesn’t hold a candle to the original series, though.  The games side-quests, called “jobs,” are the best part, since they reveal the densely honeycombed secrets of the City hub (which is otherwise frustratingly designed when its dead ends impede progress through the main mission).

Anna: Extended Edition (finished): A striking implementation of ritual magic in a first-person horror adventure game.  Probably the best thing I played this summer (tied with Fallen London), with clear design similarities with Arcana: A Ceremonial Magick Simulator, and much potential inspiration for the Arcana Ritual Toolset.

Knock Knock (finished with a bad ending): A haunting mystery game.  Along with Anna and Year Walk, Knock Knock rounds out what I think of as the holy trinity of inscrutable supernatural mystery games.  The horror genre has, for me, always been poorly named, since being scared isn’t the main appeal of these games for me (or at least the subset of horror games that I enjoy).  Games like Knock Knock allow players to explore the metaphysical mysteries of existence in the full knowledge that they will remain mysteries.  In the case of Knock Knock, the game’s most basic mechanics are cryptic, giving the game a deeply spooky atmosphere.

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations (finished): For me, the AC franchise is all about setting, and the gold filigree of the Byzantine empire is as rich a world as one could ask for.  The intertwined fates of Altair (my favorite assassin) and Ezio (who is vastly more interesting with the maturity of old age) are communicated through embedded playable flashback sequences that are pleasantly . . . Byzantine.  There is still enough emphasis on stealth here to preserve the fantasy of secret assassins, with not a pirate ship in sight.

Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (finished):  Part of my lifelong quest to play all Castlevania games on all platforms, and a justification for my purchase of an ancient Game Boy Advance.  Unique features and traits here include a well-designed card-based magic system that encourages exploration, a high difficulty curve relative to the other handheld Castlevania games, and an overall dark color palette.  Like many Castlevania games, Circle of the Moon also lets the player wield a flaming chain-whip . . . a feature that I’ll return to later in these reviews.  After experiencing deep spontaneous joy while fighting a naked succubus who was riding a giant skull, I started tagging these sorts of gaming experiences as #justmetalthings, realizing that the thrill here was analogous to living inside a heavy metal album cover.

Castlevania: Harmony of the Dissonance (70% finished): In stark contrast to Circle of the Moon, this game is fairly easy and has a bright color palette.  Its one distinguishing feature are two castles that overlap on different planes or layers of existence, so that clearing an obstacle in one castle can open a path in another.  This layered effect is an interesting variation on the inverted castle of Symphony of the Night and requires a bit more subtle thought about the spatial relationships between both castles (which are spatially harmonious and dissonant, in the words of the game’s title).  The architectural superimposition of the castles has narrative metaphysical implications, since one of the characters acquires two souls via vampiric possession and mentally creates the castle out of his spiritual conflict.

Catachresis (finished): [spoiler alert] Intriguing adventure game that implements the concept of powerlessness in the face of cosmic horror by providing a story in which the player can do nothing to alter a linear storyline.  Rich, evocative writing that exploits negative space effectively but then drops off abruptly.

Murdered: Soul Suspect (played about 2/3′s of the game): This detective adventure game, which I played on the PS4, has some engaging investigation mechanics that encourage actual thought about how the clues of the case relate to each other.  (In this respect, investigation of crime scenes is superior even to the excellent Deadly Premonition).  There are some irritatingly clunky quasi-stealth mechanics involving demon evasion that break the flow of the otherwise excellent narrative.

Metal Gear Solid (played about 3/4′s): This classic stealth game in many ways defines the genre, on which I’ll be teaching a class in Fall 2014.  The sneaking aspects of the game are tough but engaging.  The bosses, while sometimes deeply creative, are  often frustrating to me.

Metal Gear Solid 2 (almost finished): The above comments on MGS1 still apply.  [spoiler alert] The sequences toward the end in which the game deconstructs itself are jaw-droppingly, mind-blowingly brilliant in that they are both shocking and thematically dense, eschewing the cuteness that mars so much breakage of the fourth wall in games and other media.

Darksiders 2 (2/3′s finished): The best Skeletor simulator ever made.   One of the many games I’ve played this summer with an aesthetic heavily influenced by the style and iconography of metal music. #justmetalthings

A Dark Room:  A text and ASCII-based adventure in the style of Candy Box, but with less quirk and whim.  The gradual unfolding of a mystery over time draws me into these games, but only some of them continue to hold my interest.

Frog Fractions: A parodic edutainment game with many quirky and gradually emergent features.  The lead designer states that his intent was to make a game that felt as mysterious as every game did in the 1980′s (when, presumably, scarcity of documentation and few conventions of gameplay made it feel like anything was possible).   This design intent fits well with “Howard’s Law of Occult Design,” which I spoke about at GDC Online in 2012 and then wrote up for the book 100 Game Design Principles.  “Secret Significance is directly proportional to Seeming Innocence × Completeness”: the power of secret significance is directly proportional to the apparent innocence and completeness of the surface game.

Fallen London: (China) Mieville meets Farmville.  This browser-based story game competes with Anna as the best thing I’ve played this summer.  It delivers on the sense of gradually unfolding mystery over time to which A Dark Room aspires.  Its setting is an infernal London that has fallen both in the literal spatial sense (collapsing due to the weight and/or evil influence of the Grand Bazaar) and in the spiritual sense, selling its soul to invading devils.  The writing is superb, evoking the aesthetics of Mieville without his doom-laden and heavy-handed politics.  The opportunities for story-based role-playing are superb, and small fragments of poetic prose are about the only reward that could not only compensate for Farmville-style appointment mechanics, but actually render them magnificent.  Fallen London has recently expanded into a graphical sea-faring roguelike called Sunless Sea, which is set in the same universe as Fallen London.  A tabletop roleplaying game also appears to be in the works.  Like all great transmedia, this world-building succeeds because I want to spend as much time in this universe as possible, and through as many different gateways.

Ghost Rider: One of my revelations this summer is that I will play and enjoy anything in which Iets me hit things with a flaming chain whip.  Ghost Rider offers this opportunity in spades.  In many ways, it is a God of War clone, but these are far from damning words to me.  The cloning is well-executed and appropriate in this case: true to the infernal violence of the source material.   Equally true to the stunt riding background of Johnny Blaze, Ghost Rider includes exciting motorcycle sequences that allow the player to soar over roller-coaster size stunt jumps, including a stunt-riding sequence in hell.  I am afraid to watch the Ghost Rider movie on which this was based out of fear that it will, despite popular derision, turn out to be my favorite superhero movie.  When Nicolas Cage prepared for the role using his self-proclaimed “nouveau shamanic” approach, painting his face in Baron Samedi skull makeup and sewing tourmaline amulets into hidden pockets in his leather jacket, I think he was onto something, some primal demonic energy at the heart of this uber-cheesy franchise.  Spawn (and its equally terrible and wonderful videogame spinoffs) taps into the same fire.

Mountain: an experimental art game that, like many experimental art games, stretches the boundaries of the word “game.”  Another slowly-unfolding experience that comments metaphorically on the lonely, often absurd, sometimes beautiful progress of a lifespan.  I find that these experiences work best when accepted as they are.  I did.

Assassin’s Creed III (played the Kenway sequence and a little bit of Connor): Because Assassin’s Creed is all about exploring an exotic, ancient setting for me, I disliked playing in America.   The engine feels polished, glossy, and vacant of most of what made the previous installments absorbing.

Tenchu: Stealth Assassins:  I played a little of this PS1 game because it is one of the first examples of the stealth genre.  The controls and interface were difficult compared to a more recent and polished installment of the franchise (Shinobido 2: Way of the Ninja).

Hitman 2: Silent Assassins: I played a couple stages of this game in preparation for my upcoming stealth class.  I liked the controls and the atmosphere, as well as  Jesper Kyd’s orchestral score and the use of disguise as a game mechanic.

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia: I played several levels of this game, which has fantastic art direction and an engaging combat and magic system involving glyphs (enemy powers that can be equipped as weapons, mapped to the X and Y buttons, and duel-wielded to create strings of attack combos).

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin: I played a few minutes of this game. The premise of paintings as otherworldly portals in Dracula’s Castle is intriguing, and I will inevitably return to the game as part of my Castlevania quest.  The unique mechanic is the ability to switch between two characters who constantly follow each other as a tag-team.  While this mechanic results in some interesting puzzles, it also detracts from the experience of being a lone hero against overwhelming darkness, which is at the heart of the series’ Gothic thematics for me.