About This Game Ritual of the Moon is a 28 day long multi-narrative game exploring loneliness, power, and healing. Once discovering her powers, The Earth’s Council exiles the witch to the moon to live out the rest of her life looking at the earth - and the woman she loves - that she can never go back to. The player spends 5 minutes each day over the 28 days reflecting on her experiences on Earth, meditating at her altar, and making a life or death choice. The game is a daily meditational activity composed of a memory game, drawing symbols, receiving a mantra, and making a decision about the future of the earth. The game tracks the decisions the player makes, becoming a sort of mood tracker. Depending on their feelings over the lunar cycle, the player will experience one of the six unique endings. ☾ Ritual of the Moon is fully created from handcrafted and found objects scanned then digitally manipulated. Each of the witch’s reflections were hand-embroidered. The mantras were wood burned. The artists used paint, clay, fabric, paper, dried plants, wool, foam, wire, plastic, pieces of computer hardware, crystals, and a variety other media. The process was long, meditative, and iterative. Ritual of the Moon was written and designed by Kara Stone, with art and sound by Rekha Ramachandran and Julia Gingrich, programmed by Chris Kerich, Matthew R.F. Balousek, Kevin Stone and Hope Erin Phillips, and music composition by Halina Heron and Maggie McLean. ☾ Available on iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ritual-of-the-moon/id1166255479 ☾ Purchase the full original soundtrack by Halina Heron and Maggie McLean here: https://ritualofthemoon.bandcamp.com/ 7aa9394dea Title: Ritual of the MoonGenre: Casual, IndieDeveloper:Kara StonePublisher:Kara StoneRelease Date: 18 Apr, 2019 Ritual Of The Moon Download For Pc [License] curse of the moon vs ritual of the night. ritual new moon january 2018. ritual of the harvest moon blood magic. ritual of the moon kara stone. ritual new moon in scorpio. ritual of the harvest moon. ritual provisions moon batch. dark of the moon ritual. ritual for full moon october 2018. ritual full moon january 2018. ritual for the full moon. ritual of the moon. ritual full moon december 2017. ritual full moon bath. ritual of the blood moon. ritual moon band. ritual of the moon review. ritual moon metal. ritual of the black moon. ritual for full moon july 2018. ritual of the moon android. blood of the new moon ritual minecraft. ritual of the moon steam. bloodstained curse of the moon ritual. ritual for full moon lunar eclipse. ritual blue moon. ritual new moon june 2018. ritual of the new moon wow This game gets my top tier recommendation. You basically 'play' for 3 minutes daily, and can only progress the story once a day for 28 days. Even if you do not load the game for a day, the game will advance without you. Gameplay is toddler level logic, but i believe that is by design. It is basically two lines of story, a meditative thought, and a decision to steer the comet away from Earth or let it hit. I am only 5 days in, but I look forward to loading it up for a few minutes everyday. The meditative thoughts are beautiful, making it my go-to before bed game. The art style is somehow awe inspiring and adds greatly to your brief get away into a strange situation.. This game gets my top tier recommendation. You basically 'play' for 3 minutes daily, and can only progress the story once a day for 28 days. Even if you do not load the game for a day, the game will advance without you. Gameplay is toddler level logic, but i believe that is by design. It is basically two lines of story, a meditative thought, and a decision to steer the comet away from Earth or let it hit. I am only 5 days in, but I look forward to loading it up for a few minutes everyday. The meditative thoughts are beautiful, making it my go-to before bed game. The art style is somehow awe inspiring and adds greatly to your brief get away into a strange situation. Witch Bodies: Artists Rekha Ramachandran and Julia Gingrich made so many beautiful iterations of the witch's indoor and outdoor outfits. It was impossible to choose which amazing ones would be the finals, so it was more about it being the right time to choose than finding the right one to choose.I can't speak highly enough of Rekha and Julia. I had the pleasure of working with them before RotM, again after, and again now for a new project. 27 days until release.. Writing about R o t M: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joYFc05gwGsFirst, there is a new, very dramatic trailer out for Ritual of the Moon! Please get hype. Now, onto writing about writing.Not last summer but the summer before I wrote the first draft of an essay about the process of Ritual of the Moon, psychosocial disability, and time. It became two paper, one short and informal one on First Person Scholar[www.firstpersonscholar.com], and one longer and more academic one in a special issue on queerness in Game Studies [gamestudies.org]edited by Amanda Phillips and Bonnie Ruberg. Both papers are amazingly open access! I'm really proud of this paper. Even though I'm an artist, my academic writing tends to be really dry (good for getting As in school but bad for being an artist-scholar), so being able to weave together theory, art practice, and personal experience helped enable me to experiment more with it. It also is the beginning of how I'm thinking through my academic projects and dissertation, which is about the regulation of affect and debility for profit of neoliberal capitalism done through videogames, and then imagining a different, healing form of game design based for psychosocial disability. I'll be starting to write that in earnest in the fall. In these papers I talk about the design process as it relates to the faux-division of craft and technology, and the labour of craft, but mostly I focus on time. Specifically, combining notions of queer time with crip time, the former being about the ways in which queerness can and has reformed chrononormativity, queer people's relationship to time and urgency, oscillating between no future (Edelman) and hopeful futures (Munoz). Crip time is a term used to describe theories of time and disability (almost always as they are formed by capitalist impositions) that make us recognize how expectations of long things take are based on very particular minds and bodies. This is felt in the affect of every day life, the mundanity of the labour to keep on living. As you might have read in previous #RitualoftheMoonReflections, I think this daily mundane is a site of debilitation but at that same time can be the most important site of resistance, healing, and recuperation. In the paper in Game Studies, I talk about quantum time, how quantum physics is currently understanding the non-linearity of time, but I won't try to sum that up here! I also talk about my feelings re: the game taking so much longer than I thought! An excerpt: "I’ve spent a lot of the past two years agonizing and complaining. Oh my god I want the game to come out so much. It’s a year over my estimation. It’s not done. I really want it to be done. I’m scared it will never be done. I’m scared it will loom over my head for the rest of my life. I’m scared I will put it out before it’s ready.How do you know when it’s time to let go?But I’ve had to shift my thinking about it. Instead of hating that it isn’t out yet, I’ve started to tell myself that it needed time to be fully digested, for me and the team to fully understand it and do the idea justice. It needed time to transform. I tell myself that labour takes time. That love takes time. I needed time to strip it to the barest bones of meditation on healing the future.I’m so used to making things in a hypomanic state: work work work, exhaust myself then be done. But the pace has to be different for this game because it is about a different pace. It is about daily dedication in small bits over long periods of time. It is about being confused, stuck, suicidal. It is about meditating for 5 minutes a day because over time that creates a ritual that sustains us. And maybe the game is waiting for the right time to be released. Maybe it is waiting for when it makes the most sense. I’m realizing that it feels more prescient than ever. I know it is on so many of our minds, that push and pull between the desire to set the world on fire, giving up on it, and only caring for each present instant, and on the other hand, putting every ounce of ourselves into making the world better even if it feels fruitless, even when the majority seems against us. It feels befitting and relevant to consider the future of queerness, of racism, and of disability in North America and much of the world, at a time when living on the moon by yourself doesn’t seem like such a bad idea."Now, it's almost out and I have new feelings about it! More on that tomorrow...2 days until release.. FIrst Sketches: These images are thee first digital sketches I did of the layout of Ritual of the Moon. This was back when it was under the working title "Moon Witch", had an inventory, resources, and an opening cinematic. She used to have a cat! But now she's all alone.At the time I I drew this I was thinking that it would be water colour-y digital animation for the visuals - and I obviously was going to hire an artist! I think everything about it R o t M now is way better, the art style, the stripped down design... but maybe the earth should be that big again?? Doing these reflections and looking back on old art does affirm some choices but makes me reconsider others. I don't think there is any way around that. All I can do it look at it as a product of the time it was made. 17 days until release.. The Altar: These images are some of the altars we tried out. As always when looking at early versions: wow, colour! Everyday the player must go to the altar to perform a ritual to receive that day's mantra. First one must arrange the altar objects in a specific way. This is a memory game that resets each week. On the first day, there will be one object. On the second, there will be two. The third, three, and then continued until 7. The player must press them in the order they appeared, so theoretically must remember the order they appeared. In actuality, you can just tap them all until you find the right one. I wouldn't want to lock people out of it really; it's more like setting an intention to link all the days together and start a pattern for that week. If you have played Ritual of the Moon at a gallery or festival, you would have played the "simon says' version which wee made specifically for exhibition, where you tap after it animates. and don't have to remember anything.After the memory game, there is the connect the dots part which I talked about in a previous #RitualoftheMoonReflections. Then the player receives their mantra for the day. There is about 60 different mantras - but I swear I always get the same 4! These mantras were woodburned by me 5 years ago. Some of the mantras are trite, some are dark and sad, some might ring true with the player. Because the game is about self-reflection on emotional states, the mantras are there to prompt that reflection. It's not a fortune, it doesn't have to be "true" to instigate self-reflection, just like tarot and astrology. It's more meaningful that you think about it and situate yourself in relation to the given information. 15 days until release.. On Confidence and Vulnerability: I've been confident that Ritual of the Moon is good for a long time. I'm often confident in my work. The very beginning is my most self-conscious time. I try to keep everything very sheltered and away from judgement, both from myself and others. Sometimes those initial ideas are really nothing and should never see the light of day. When they are something and when the general plan is outlined, I begin to be like, alriiiiight! Then after the first 1/3 of production I'm pretty constantly like, hell ya, this is great. But showing other people can still be difficult. My last project, the earth is a better person than me, is a way weirder and more personal game than Ritual of the Moon. It has explicit sex (with trees, none the less) and has an odd tone of humour, erotica, and self-hate. I was lucky enough to start the project in a graduate critique class where we all workshopped projects. The very first time I showed it, I was like nooooope what the fuck am i doing?? I knew I liked it, but it and I was very vulnerable. After the feedback which was really encouraging and had really useful critiques, I was in full out hell ya mode, and stayed that way until just before release. Then I felt vulnerable again and worried if people would like it. Even though I think earth person is amazing and should win a literary award and its most important that I feel proud of it, of course I still want other people to like it too. I'm at that pre-release vulnerability stage now with Ritual of the Moon. I've been confident for so long and now the fear is bubbling up! What if no one likes it? What if everyone hates it? What if no one knows how to play it? What if it's so buggy and doesn't work? What if no one plays it? There are some things I think are design flaws (which I won't detail just yet) but ultimately are fairly small. Because it's been like 4 years since designing parts of it, I can look back and think, well, I made that choice then but I wouldn't have made it now. It's not killing me. Overall I still love it. It's even easier to love than some of my previous projects because it was much more collaborative. The art and the music are soooo incredible that if I'm feeling down about the design or the writing, I can think to myself, at least nothing else of the app store looks this beautiful. At least people will open the app just to listen to the music. I think I have a good relationship to making art. Sometimes I'm insecure but that's fine. I try to be really cautious of not letting the insecurity prevent me from making an honest and experimental piece. Only one time in earth person did I change a storyline because I was worried what other people would think. I kind of wish I didn't, because that path is now my least favourite. So far in my lift, my financial well-being has not been dependent on my artistic success, which makes my intention to make weird, open, personal, honest art more feasible. It means I can make something that I would like, and hope others like it but my well-being isn't determined by if other people like it. Reading this post I probably seem overly confident. That's fine too. The confidence can help overcome the vulnerability needed to make the kind of work I want to make. (this post inspired by today's Nancy: https://www.gocomics.com/nancy/2019/04/08)11 days until release.. What Could Have Been: Originally I was going to write 28 #RitualoftheMoonReflections but the last one, Pre-Release Feelings: Emptiness, felt pretty final to me - although, I'm told, kind of eended them on a bad note. (If you don't like bad-note endings, maybe Ritual of the Moon is not for you!). I did that ritual on release day I wrote about and burned some things I wanted to let go of. Felt nice but didn't really work as much as it usually does. The major thing I wanted to let go of was all the things that could have been. It's hard not to see flaws in your own work, what could be better or improved upon. There's one major thing I wish I did differently, but it's something I chose early in the process and didn't realize it was not a good choice until a few months ago. For that I am like, welp, live and learn. (I'm not going to say what it is because I don't want you to realize what it is!!!) Something I wouldn't change at all is the visuals. I think they're so beautiful. There's nothing that looks like it. But doing these #RitualoftheMoonReflections made me realize how beautiful so much of our process was. Making art is always full of possibilities and constraints. I usually plan and then impulsively pick something more than I like to iterate or edit, whereas artists Julia Gingrich and Rekha Ramachandran do a lot of iterations to refine and experiment. That plus the 5 years it took since I first started planning it means there are many different things that could have been. Some are so beautiful I'm sad they're not in the final game. But Ritual of the Moon is one game with one look. It could never be the way it is without the ways it's not. It couldn't be any other way because this is the way it became. Now that you all have a taste of what Ritual of the Moon looks like, I thought I'd share this video of our design process, and some stills from different prototypes. 4 days after release. https://vimeo.com/163869155. Mini Games: Yesterday I wrote a little about the transformation of the mini-games. Before what they are now, a memory game and connecting the dots, there were 3 different mini games that the player had to do each day at different stations rather than just at the altar. This sketch is from 4.5 years ago so I don't exactly remember how they were supposed to work. The top left is weaving, the bottom left is tracing a rune, and then the elixir is somehow filling a bottle with different colours. These were never programmed, just in the initial design brainstorming. I do think there is something to the texture of tracing, of slowly dragging a finger across the smooth phone rather than frantic tapping tapping tapping. 25 days until release.. On Ritual: These are images of different trials of the calendar. This is the non-black and white, not digitally manipulated raw wood burns. In the past few years I've been thinking about ritual, time, mundanity, and habits. My very first videogame, Medication Meditation, was about the boring daily labour of living with mental illness and the activities and rituals one must do to sustain life, such as taking medication every day at the right time, self-affirmations, and watching thoughts and letting them go.I can be ritualistic about work. In writing the earth is a better person than me, I only listened to one album over and over and over. I would put it on and then I would know it's time to write. (It's Angel Olsen's My Woman. It's one of my favourite albums ever but now I can't listen to it without being nostalgic about my time writing earth person in Tokyo). When I'm writing papers, I need to have my desk be set up in a specific way, a big mug of tea or kombucha, and put on some specific aromatherapy. I like some big rituals, like new years eve intention setting and burning sheets of paper with things I'd like to live behind written on them, but mostly I think the real transformation is in small daily rituals. For the past 4 or 5 years I have been a mostly dedicated practitioner of a kind of yoga called ashtanga, where you do the same thing every day 6 days a week (and not full moons or new moons because it's thought that injury is more likely on those days). My current life does not have a set schedule outside this, so it's been extremely beneficial to wake up everyday around the same time and do the same movements. The unchanging structure makes it so that I can become aware of the differences in my body, mood, and mind each day. Sometimes - and sometimes often - I can't do the full practice, but as long as I get to my mat then it "counts" because it is about the habit of doing it, of showing up and meeting myself where I'm at. I'd like to say that's how I begin my day, but really I begin my day by immediately looking at my phone. My alarm goes off, I turn it off, and then I I read any messages I got, or check twitter or if I'm really procrastinating getting out of bed, I answer my emails. I tell myself looking at my phone helps me wake up, but really it helps me delay getting out of bed. This morning ritual is really not doing me any good! I won't go into detail as to why but I think we all know it's a bad habit. I've tried sleeping away from my phone so I don't look at it, but I can't sleep without listening to podcasts or other media (silence? with my thoughts? while trying to sleep? not going to happen), and the alarm clock I bought it somewhat unreliable. And I'd just go pick up my laptop and phone and go back to bed anyway. So if I'm going to look at my phone in the morning, which it seems like I will, I'd much rather do a self-reflective activity like Ritual of the Moon. It leads me through some calming actions, gives me a daily mantra, and then I do make a choice based on my feelings that morning. Maybe one day I'll learn to live without my phone, but in the meantime I hope I can replace my bad habits with good rituals. 9 days until release.. GDC 2019 Talk: Mental Illness and Videogames: This past GDC, just a few weeks ago, I was on the Indie Soapbox Panel alongside some really amazing people. Each talk was only 5 minutes so I I tried to say as much as I could as succinctly as I could. I was really sick that week - sicker than I've ever been in my life! But I chugged water, slathered my nose in minty essential oils, and coughed a bunch right before going on. My voice sounds a bit sick but I'm just glad I didn't cough for 5 minutes straight. I liked my talk before I gave it. I thought it was to the point, and that the slides were really beautiful. After I gave it, I just felt empty inside. What's the point of anything?https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025698/Indie (I start at 51:05). Below is a somewhat modified transcript in case you don't want to watch the recording. 12 days until release."There are three ways into talking about mental illness and videogames. The first is representation.In my recent game the earth is a better person than me, we follow Delphine, a young femme who is going through a crisis and runs away from her problems and into a forest. She finds that she can talk to the environment around her; she talks to the moon about love and not understanding her cycles of emotion, to dirt about suicide and self-hate, and to the flower about perfectionism and self-harm. I like to think that it shows a specific but dynamic representation of a woman living with mental illness. This is an example of how we represent mental illness and those with mental illnesses. It is the most common way of thinking about mental illness and videogames, but just one facet. The next is process. Polaroid Panic isn’t a game, but the first – very first project I ever made where I was open about my own experiences with mental illness. I carried a polaroid camera with me for 3 months and took a photo of my face each time I had a panic attack. The pictures are material proof of a feeling, but a feeling the viewer may not be able to read onto my face. All this process took was to carry a small camera bag, and to be in touch with emotional state. Of course, this is not how we usually are making media! We’re working in a culture that normalizes and valorizes overwork. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the term crunch. And know not to do it! But do it anyway. Sometimes our bosses say we have to. Sometimes we feel like we have to. Sometimes it feels good, because we are performing as good productive citizens of capitalism. But overwork is bad for all of us. And it’s worse for some of us. Those of us with certain mental illnesses, psychosocial disability, or mental disabilities, chronic conditions, may not be able to work like that. The energy drain happens faster, and the recovery is slower, and the repercussions more detrimental. Big indie studios, small indie studios, co-ops, collectives, and even individuals need to really check their expectations of work, labor and productivity. Productivity isn’t worth the debilitation. And that means we need to create new models of game making. and I believe we can create a process that actually benefits us, a reparative design process, like I did here in Polaroid Panic, where the end result was me being more in touch with my feelings, open about sharing them, and not being able to disregard them. The final facet is design. Ritual of the Moon is another piece that took a long time to make but I didn’t mean it to. I’ve been working on it for over 4 years when I thought it would be 1. It is to finally be released on the full moon in April next month. The game takes place over 28 days. Real-time days. the player plays for 3 minutes each day, where you arrange objects on an altar, receive a mantra for the day, and then you make a choice based on your personal emotional state at that moment, if you want to destroy or protect the earth from a comet that is coming to hit it. The game tracks your choices in a calendar, acting like a mood chart for the month. I wanted to make space for ritual, for short plays that we can integrate into our lives, that’s slow and meditative, that make us reflect on our emotional state, not cause anything frustrating or panicky. Many of us are rightly criticizing labour practices that expect us to work 80 hours a week but want to make games that take 80 hours to play. straight. With No breaks. That’s how they’re designed! Many videogames actually reinforce overwork. We think of A good game is a game you want to play all. the. Time. We design so there is a constant pull to keep playing. This is done most often by activating panic, aggression, frustration, and momentary gratification. then looping this over and over. We try to emotionally manipulate the player so they play more. But these are just a few of the emotional possibilities of games. What if we made games that activated melancholy, or self-reflection, or tenderness? I think that these need to be designed differently than the way we design for panic, aggression, frustration, and gratification. It’s not as simple as making a game about a tender and soft person and expecting the player to feel the same, but designing mechanics and gameplay and even controllers differently to bring out feelings of tenderness and care, and using a process of game creation that does the same for us, the makers. I think games are emotionally powerful, and it's time we start channeling that power into a wider emotional landscape. we need to make reparative games, games that can help us heal."
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Ritual Of The Moon Download For Pc [License]
Updated: Mar 19, 2020
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