Single-player Tabletop Game
Snow is a tabletop narrative game that uses deckbuilding to create a unique procedurally generated storytelling mechanic. As you progress, you uncover memories by digging through the snow, represented in game by individual counters the player adds or removes, depending on the event cards they draw. These memories tell, in fragmentary form, a story of lost love, failed revolution, and how we cope with the past by either reveling in it or suffering the consequences of what we've done.
As a solo developer, I was responsible for the following:
Writing, Narrative Systems, Game Design, Visual/Graphic Design,
UX
Time On Project:
58 hours
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There are two basic card types, Memories and Events. The player draws four Memory cards at the beginning of the game (one each for the Cabin, Woods, Garden, and Lake locations) that function both as primary objectives to uncover as well as significant revelations about who the player is in game. With each reveal, the player receives either a lasting bonus or penalty, to reflect both the joys and the traumas our past is made up of.
If Memories reflect the past, then Event cards are representative of the present, what’s happening from day to day as you go about uncovering things. These narrative fragments come with temporary bonuses, penalties, and, in some cases, no effect at all, because life isn’t always a great joy or a terrible burden. Sometimes it just is. And given the card draw mechanic, each playthrough’s story will have a procedurally generated feel.
Snow, represented by small counters, is the primary impediment in game and the thing you need to remove in order to uncover Memories and progress through your story. On any given day (i.e. turn), you won’t necessarily be able to fully uncover a location, so some strategy is involved based on what the day’s bonuses or penalties happen to be.
The game's primary resource is Will, which you determine at the beginning of each day/turn by rolling 2d6 and adding or subtracting any relevant penalties from Memories or the day's Event card. Every action in the game requires either a fixed or variable amount of Will. For instance, removing a snow counter from a location always costs 2, while moving to a location costs half the number of snow counters at that location, rounding up. So, theoretically, if you neglect a location for too long, it will become impossible to move there and uncover its Memory.
The purpose in having Will be a relatively limited resource is to make the game feel a bit like a struggle. It's a cliché to say the point is the journey or "the friends we made along the way," but the irony of playing Snow lies in how the more efficiently you get through it, the fewer cards you see, and so you get less of the total story. The more the player struggles, the more setbacks they face, the more they see the full picture of what is happening and has happened in the game's narrative.
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The four locations (plus Bonfire) give Snow a sense of movement and place that might be hard to grasp solely from the cards. With snow counters accumulating and diminishing at each of the Woods, Cabin, Lake, and Garden, the board layout gives the player a strategic overview of the total state of play, so that no one location becomes unmanageable. This means, it's important the game have a board, not because it's a "board game," but as a way of providing the player a complete, literally top down perspective on a narrative system that mostly presents itself in fragmentary form.
Snow is a game about what it means to struggle through uncovering the past, but it is also a fairly unique narrative system for telling fragmented stories. Procedurally generated narratives are still relatively new in games, and what Snow brings to these developments is a more strategic rather than absolute randomness. There is a clear balance between being in and out of control over what happens. For the player this makes the game's mechanics a more meaningful experience.
A meaningful mechanic is one that is explicitly tied to a subjective effect, to a deliberate experience. It's meant to be representative. Failing to address the accumulation of snow counters is analogous to the failure to address those troubling memories that haunt us in our own lives. The mechanic isn't synonymous with the real life experience, but it does point toward it in a way that, say, typical combat mechanics don't quite correspond to real violence. Making use of meaningful mechanics allows the designer to elicit and specifically tailor a broader range of emotional effects, so that the player is personally invested in what they do rather than using the game to "check out" from reality.
As a designer, I'm not morally opposed to escapism, but this game was created at a time in my life when a number of problems had all come to a head. Making this game was an attempt, at least in part, to exorcise certain demons, so for me the mechanics couldn't be arbitrary. Randomness is present not merely for the sake of being random but to represent what is unforeseen in one's life. Regardless of how or why certain things come about, you still have to deal with them. Likewise, I wanted to design a game that is immanently replayable, because quite often the memories that shape us in the present are something we mill over time and again.
For the player, then, who isn't me and likely wouldn't recognize the allusions to my own joys and troubles on each card, replayability means becoming vested with the game's story slowly and perhaps with some difficulty. It means experiencing something not identical to my recent life story but something that indicates it, so that they might empathize with, if not me, then the character I have created for them. That's really the best I could hope for.
If you like what you see and want to work together, get in touch!
uahsenaa[at]gmail[dot]com