Arcana: A Tarot Story - Postmortem

Narrative Designer & Product Owner

Team Size - 7
Production Timeline - 3 months
Engine - Unreal 5

Arcana: A Tarot Story is an interactive narrative experience that immerses the player in the world of the Tarot. The player receives a reading and is then physically taken into the world of the card. Gameplay consists of navigating and exploring the environment and making crucial choices that will decide the interpretation of the card after the end of the level. 

As the team’s narrative designer, I was tasked with creating a short, but immersive storyline in which the player would be met with meaningful choices.

When we established the idea of having a game based around Tarot we had to keep in mind the team’s strengths, which with three artists and only one programmer, we figured the game would need to have very minimal systems, but a rich environment and narrative. 

We intended to use Tarot as a means of storytelling, using certain cards as our different levels as well as giving the player an introspective experience. The jumping off point for the game was when we established the concept of the player being given a reading, and then being sucked into the world of that card, where they have to make different choices that are thematic to the card. Our original plan was to do an arc of three cards, The Fool, The Hanged Man, and The Tower. These were chosen based partially on the card’s overall meaning, but also based off of the feasibility of creating environments and narrative centered around them. We quickly discovered the massive scope, especially on the narrative end, in which we decided to just develop an experience for one card due the amount of time we had left in the semester.

While everyone on the team did amazing work, we weren’t able to deliver the game we originally intended. With some of the issues being outside of our control, I felt that a large part of why the project didn’t work was because of the team dynamic. What I mean by this is that, a majority of us were somewhat quiet or introverted, there weren’t a lot of big personalities on the team. And with that being said, none of us really had a strong sense of leadership, which is probably why a lot of the project management aspects fell through the cracks. 

From the beginning, we were very vague with a lot of our ideas, and nothing was ever set in stone, so many things were up in the air and not very decisive. It was hard to keep morale up near the end of the project with constant technological issues, but also how far behind we felt during development. During the few weeks we had before greenlight a member of our team dropped out, leaving us without a producer.