Pixels & Predictions: Mama Nyah's House Of Tarot Is The Game That Reads You

This bonus episode of Tarot Interviews came about as unexpected fortune allowed me to interview Devin Reed about a new tarot card based computer game he's been working on.

The game is called Mama Naya's House of Tarot and it's a digital tarot card reading app inspired by New Orleans and old school computer games. Unlike other digital tarot card apps, the readings are personal and no two readings are ever the same. You know, we had a lot of fun bringing Mama Naya to life, so we're excited to share this with the community.

So I was desperately curious what was the main inspiration behind Mama Naya? Was it a family member, someone you know?

So I live in New Orleans and I moved here about two years ago. You know New Orleans has a rich history that blends cultures from all over the earth, but it's also like a huge I don't know if you've ever been here, but it is a huge center for magic and witchcraft and tarot. It's literally all over the city.

Mamma Naya was basically just inspired by all of the witches in town and all of the tarot readers that are just litter the streets in the French Quarter. They have like card tables set up just doing readings everywhere in the city. If they don't have their own brick and mortar location, there's just all over the streets doing readings everywhere. Also, that means that, like, the witches live among us as New Orleanians, if that makes sense, and so they're not just like these estranged group of counterculture people. They are our neighbors. We wanted to create a witchy, multicultural woman who was raised in the South, who was part of the community. So the game takes place inside of Mama Naya's house, which is like a New Orleans style house, which it's like very common for people to have businesses in their home. We kind of just created her based on being inspired by the city.

I guess I do like that idea. I like the idea, as you say, of that kind of um you're walking down the road and somebody being able to offer you a tarot reading. That's not something I've ever experienced in the uk it's very.

I've only seen it in new Orleans.

Is it something in the water, something in the ley lines? What is it that causes that?

energy. But I think culturally in the US, in the American South, for a long time, historically, new Orleans was a place for all of the people who didn't really belong in the strict rules of Christianity of the South. For a long time it's been a place for people that were multi-ethnic or people that were gay or people that were pagan, and so I think that you just have had so many people for so many years here. You know, being in this community, that it's also like. Also, the city is like very magical itself. You know there's a lot of like fantasy lore here. There's a lot of ghost lore here. It's kind of a, you know, at nighttime it's kind of a spooky city, so there's a lot of. There's a lot of ghost lore here. It's kind of a, you know, at night time it's kind of a spooky city, so there's a lot of there's a lot of energy here, you know.

Ah, it sounds like a wonderful place I'd dearly like to visit. Okay, so back to the game. First of all, I need to ask about the art style. Now I'm of a certain age where to me, it's not quite as old school as it may be. Um, it looks yeah, yeah, sure, sure it looks like um a sierra online game or a lupus arts game I'm glad that you understand this.

This is great. Yeah, it's uh, the it was designed to be like. When I say old school computer era, I mean like old school, like when I was growing up. Um, I'm a millennial, so old school to me would be like the era of, like, the windows 95, the windows 97 era not really before that, there's a whole slew of games that existed before that but like, even like the 2000s era of games. I wanted to make something in that art style and we started doing prototypes and, um, you know, we had a some market research and, well, we also wanted to make something that was kind of stood out from other tarot card apps that were out there yeah, I mean looking at the, uh, the art design, obviously it seems to be rider waite smith, but with a twist.

How have you evolved, that's?

that's a great question. That's a great question, yeah, so I wanted to make we worked with an artist to do the cards, uh, the art for all the cards. I wanted to make sure that we were using a tarot deck that was familiar to people, so we chose the Rider Waite deck instead of, like, a more esoteric deck. The cards are almost they're not exactly exact translations, but they're kind of like pixel art translations of the Rider Waite. You know, we wanted the artist to have freedom, but we also wanted to keep as much of the Rider Waite symbolism as possible.

I see Out of interest, which was the most challenging card to transfer into a kind of digital medium like this.

When you're making pixel art you only have, like, so many physical pixels to work with, so you have to like, condense things. And so cards like the Wheel of Fortune that have a lot of like symbols, like tiny symbols and words on them and stuff those cards when you're trying to condense them, are more difficult than like the like. The ace of cups is just a. It's basically a cup of water coming out.

It's not as detailed as some of the other cards I actually, uh, in a an interview two days ago, we pulled out the wheel of fortune and I've never sat and looked at it for any length of time. It's a card that very rarely comes up for me and it's really weird. I mean, you've got things. Yeah, it's a very strange card. I mean, normally you'd just associate it with the wheel itself, but, as you say, all of the motifs like the snake around it.

In fact I have it just here from the last reading that I had and yeah, so you've got your little sphinx on the top there, you've got this snake-like serpent thing, obviously showing the difference between sort of heaven and hell and the punishment and the blessings that could be bestowed upon you. But this thing's like there's a goat with wings at the bottom here and it's bizarre wings at the bottom here and, yeah, it's bizarre. So, yeah, so I was looking at that and thinking if I was to sit down and, you know, in the style of monkey island, try and reinterpret that that's. That's going to be a big ask. Approximately how long did the whole project take?

that's a great question. Um, it took us about six months to do do everything from start to finish, so it's pretty fast as far as a production cycle goes and um but we have a lot of like.

We have a lot of updates and stuff we want to add, but we wanted to get it to a polished point where we could share it with people and then kind of add on to it okay, and if I was to uh go into steam and I've put out my, my hard-earned pennies and I'm loading up your game, or uh, it's, it seems, halfway between a game and then a kind of like art installation halfway between that and a kind of, uh, your personal journey, it's what? Yeah, yeah, how would you describe it? What is it?

um, yeah, I'd say um. You've described it very well just there. It is a personal journey. It is a, it is a tool that you can use like a tarot deck to help you, um, do insightful readings that you can do for your own solo readings without having to like do it yourself, if that makes sense. And so it is kind of a game because it's interactive. It's if you were, you know, it's kind of almost like the way a visual novel is a game on steam, um, but it's much more like personal than that. Like a visual novel is like a story that someone's telling and this is a thing that you are directly interacting with and it is about you as a person, which is kind of unique in the game space in general, as it being about you, not like a character that you're role playing.

Okay, there's a in-person game that I've seen called Wreck this Deck, where what you do is you get a. I think it's marketed as a TTRPG, I'm not sure. Basically, you download a PDF and you get a deck of playing cards. It's a way of customizing a deck, defacing a deck as part of a game. It has this huge community around it. Are you going to be? It's building community around this guy.

Yeah, yeah, for sure, you know we've been. I just finished making it. So now I'm like, oh, I should start marching this thing. Yeah, I should have done this earlier. But yeah, I would love to do that. You know it's funny. You mentioned the in-person game. We were pretty inspired, actually for the whole project at the beginning, by those old like carnival or arcade machines with the animatronics, where you like put in a input and then it, like spit, gives you like a card and then, like the person like talks to you like the zoltar machines, you know. And so we originally we were trying to figure out a way to make a physical cabinet that you could put at a bar, that, like, people could get a tarot reading from, and so we were like, well, let's make the software first. And so we're still not done, we're still working. On the other part, it'd be really cool to have little cabinets at bars people could get a reading yeah, so you've already got my brain whirring on that.

I mean, would you use something like a, a raspberry pi, in there to drive it um?

yeah, definitely, it's definitely, that's probably what I would, that's probably what we would start with, at least. I mean, that's, that's the most accessible thing. I mean it depends on, like I think, at the beginning we would definitely use Raspberry Pi, something like that, a little microcomputer program, everything in Python.

And in terms of playing the game, I'm sat there and, as I say, I've loaded this up. What kind of? Just talk to me about the kind of the experience I would get from it. So would I be doing single card pulls? Cool, yeah, how would?

it work right now. Right now it is like limited in that way, because it is a very like a little capsulated experience and we're out, we weren't, we're playing on. We have like a roadmap for expanding to other things. But right now, you know, the game starts and the music plays. And the music is very like immersive and creepy, and you and the first thing you see is Mama Naya's house and it's like nighttime in New Orleans and the wind's blowing. Then you like enter the house to start the reading.

So it's a three card call past, present, future just simple. At the beginning you choose a intention and then, after you choose an intention, you choose, you pick your three cards from a spread. What I really like about that is that the way that we did it was very true to tarot. So it's not like there was two ways we could have done that in the backend. We could have had the spread be.

Every time you click a card, it just randomly generates a tarot card, or what I did was kind of took it the step further to make it more realistic. I basically shuffled the card before the scene starts and then there, when they're spread out, they're literally just upside down. So you are literally choosing the right one, Like you would in an actual tarot reading, instead of it just being generated behind the scenes. So it's like just shuffled, but then when it's spread out, all of the cards are what they are underneath, which is a very cool feature. Then after that, you just go through each card.

At first, mama Naya gives you an introduction to the full reading and then she gives you a more in-depth reading for your past, your present and your future card and then she gives you a summary based on all three of them together. We looked at a lot of the other terror apps that are out there and we couldn't really find anything that was like giving people actual cohesive readings. Almost all of them were just basically, you would, you would pull, you would pull three cards and then it would just show you the like encyclopedia page for each card and kind of leave you to your own interpretation. But mom and I like takes everything into account and she talks in her own voice and she like has like a deep hospitality and like she's talking to you instead of you just reading like a, like an article, if that makes sense.

I see. So it sounds like the other apps or software platforms. It's almost like pictures on a quilt, whereas what you're creating here is more of a tapestry. Is that right?

Yeah, that's a good way to put it exactly because, like, if mom and I takes into account your other cards when she's doing the readings, also your intention, which I've never seen anybody, uh, doing even just that. I've seen people like set an intention, but then it just says what the thing is at the top, but every single one of your readings is like so if you choose, like your romantic life as one of the intentions, and if you choose that all the readings for all the cards are going to be about your romantic life instead of just being, like, showing you the definition of the card and you because, like, the idea is that she's doing the interpretation to help you, because she's the tarot reader.

I love this idea. I mean, I am possibly your target market. I am a software first geek. I have been reading tarot cards, I think, for about 30 years now, and I love this idea. Can you remind me when is due for release? When's it going to drop?

I would say because I think we're running into some problems with Valve. I would say probably by the end of the month it could be live on Wednesday or it might take another week for us to resolve some things on the back end with them.

Super. And my last question for you is because I'd like to kind of really enjoy, immerse myself in that kind of New Orleans experience. If I was to sit playing this or interacting with it, what should I be drinking? What's a good New Orleans drink for me to drink in my hand?

Very, very, very good question. I love that. I'm a really big cocktail guy also, so I really appreciate this question. Um well, my first, my first thought would be you know, a cup of warm tea, because that's like the first thing I would think of with tara. Let's see new orleans drink. Oh, I know what you would have, uh, if a very new orleans cocktail that I would drink and retail with would be a, which is a, um, classic cocktail with a basically, uh, it's basically a rye whiskey. That is almost straight and they keep talking, basically they, they rinse the glass with ad, they rinse the glass with absinthe. Uh, it's, it's.

They had a tiny bit of sugar, so it's almost like an old-fashioned, but it's got got some like effervescentness to it and it's also a, uh, very historical drink in the city also sounds like it's going to be lethal if you have more than one yeah, yeah, but it's very good and it's, it's, uh, it's made with sazerac rye, which is a rye that's made in new orleans, so that's, that's the drink that I would have, uh, if I was at mama naya's house that's a Devin Reed.

Thank you so much for joining me today.

Yeah it was great talking to you.

I'm looking forward very much to playing Mama Naya's house on Steam when it's released.