lectronice → works

StoryDicetober 2021

A dice-based prompt generator

Finding a use for these stupid dice at last → complete (October 2021)

Since #Inktober suffers from bad press because its creator has decided to trademark the name, and also because I'm not passionate about using actual ink and paper, I've decided to avoid using the official prompts. A bit of discussion in the Merveilles Town led to #theDaily hastag.

In 2020, I made 31 digital drawings using the sitelen sitelen Toki Pona script, and I enjoyed the process a lot. I aimed at a somewhat realistic ink and paper style, and kept exploring the idea in early 2021 for #Inktober 52, but I grew bored of it.

Fast forward to October. I wanted to try something a bit different while keeping a similar process. I remembered I had four boxes of Rory's Story Dice, and thought I could use them to create my own prompts. So I decided to put them all in a bag and pick three every day, then roll them, take a picture of the result, and post it on Mastodon. I'm also keeping an archive thread on my Toki Pona forum.

These drawings are very pink and look like alien neon signs. That's because I'm using the color palette of Phalanstery, a cyberpunk adventure game project I started back in 2017. Driven by my usual creative procrastination tendencies, I buried it under dozens of new (and still unfinished) projects. But I'm now rebooting it, with the firm intent of finishing it.

The idea is to use #theDaily as an exploratory process to refine the major themes of Phalanstery with the help of Toki Pona. I see these drawings as the fragmented musings of some nondescript rogue AI haunting the network. Maybe they'll become part of the game, or maybe they'll stay in the actual network limbo, but they are also actual game design and worldbuilding tools.