Testing my own assumptions

I began by writing down what I thought I knew about fortune-telling. It was not much, and some of it was wrong.

So I started with questions instead of a solution:

• What is fortune-telling, and how many types are there?
• What are the differences between them?
• Which is the most popular, in real life and in the digital world?
• Why do people like to know about their future?
• How can people trust the information, if they care about that?
• Which tools are used: tarot cards, astrology, palm reading, a crystal ball and others?

Comparing the methods

I rated eight common methods from 0 to 5 against six things a fortune can give a person: curiosity, entertainment, reassurance, guidance and control, connection, and a way of coping. The methods were numerology, astrology, runes, tarot, scrying, palmistry, pendulum and tasseography.

Three stood out for me: tarot, runes and tasseography.

An idea from my five-year-old

One night I asked my five-year-old son what he thought about fortune-telling. He had no idea what it was, but once I explained, his imagination took over and he started sketching his own magical visions in his notebook.

His idea was an app that uses your current location and your next travel destination, with the equator and the hour circle, to tell you about your future.

Inspired by the Earth, I created a method of fortune-telling around four themes:

Sketching, then a cardboard model

I sketched the screens and the dice machine by hand, then built a physical model out of cardboard to test how the dice would move.

What the feedback said

• The material should feel like glass or metal, in both texture and sound.
• The angle of the last part should be sharper, so the dice come out more easily.
• The inner step should be narrower, at around 45 degrees.
• Showing a hand or a button press on the same screen would improve the experience.

The game

The game opens on a red curtain. The Earth, drawn as a face with a headscarf and gold hoop earrings, welcomes the player and offers to take them to a place; in the version I recorded, that place is Africa. The player then arrives in a village at night.

From there, every turn works the same way:

• Red arrows appear above the buildings with the instruction to choose one and throw the dice.
• A twenty-sided die is thrown, and the number it lands on shows in the corner of the screen.
• That number opens a card with an illustrated scene, a title, and a short reading for past, present and future.
• The player goes back to the village to throw again.

How we built it

We built the game in Unity, working with Office apps and AI-based 3D tools.