Design Statement

When reading the short story of The Singing Bone, we see a clear beginning and ending, but quite ambiguous. This leads me to think about what can be inserted into the middle of the story and finally makes me think of random events. After this idea emerged from my mind, I set it as my creative goal. I want to focus the story on the part of forest adventure, so I set the game story as: the game story begins with the information of “the two brothers are entering the forest to kill a boar to win the hand of the princess”, and the end as “one of the brothers kills the boar and wins the hand of the princess”. The beginning sets the background and goal of the players, the ending sets the winning condition of the players. When deciding what to do for the middle, I want to somehow get the idea of TRPGs that you have a rough story script, but the experience is created by you and other players (including the DM). I do not want the game to have a GM, because GMing the game is too complex for such a tabletop game. Finally, I have decided to use pre-designed cards with story pieces on them to replace the role of a GM, and the flipped cards can also provide randomness to create a unique story for the players.

When trying to design the main mechanics, the idea of printing a tilemap when developing pixel video games gave me some inspiration. The first version of the game is that the players are flipping cards on a grid, the flipped cards are staying on the grid-like path tiles painted on the forest map. The cards have a route painted on the cards, and the cards can be turned with a certain angle to provide more freedom of choice. After a playtest, we found that this mechanics becomes problematic after the several beginning steps. After the first several rounds, the players start to meet. What will happen if you land on an already disclosed tile? We made several twists but they were either not easy to play or would lose the function of recording the journey of the players. Finally, we have decided to let the players take the tiles they have passed and put them into a booklet to form a mini storybook.

The final effect feels good. Although we can no longer visualize the path on the grid, the booklet did achieve the goal of recording the story. The story booklet feels quite interesting to read, especially when something hilarious happens during the game. For example, encountering 5 peaceful routes (a neutral card with no effect) in a row; continuously encountering many dwarves who claim to be a friend of your grandfather and gave you a weapon… From the observation of playtests, we are quite happy to see how the story has become both interesting to play and interesting to share between friends.