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/ 1075eedd30 Title: Ritual of the MoonGenre: Casual, IndieDeveloper:Kara StonePublisher:Kara StoneRelease Date: 18 Apr, 2019 Ritual Of The Moon Full Crack [FULL] blood of the new moon ritual minecraft. ritual new moon in scorpio. ritual full moon december 2017. ritual of the moon kara stone. ritual for full moon in scorpio. rituals of the moon wow. dark of the moon ritual. ritual of the moon game. night of the full moon dark ritual. ritual of the black moon. blood of the new moon ritual. bloodstained curse of the moon ritual. curse of the moon vs ritual of the night. ritual of the moon android. ritual moon band. ritual moon metal. dark ritual night of the full moon. ritual of the moon. ritual blue moon. ritual new moon january 2018. ritual of the moon ios. night of the full moon dark ritual game. bloodstained ritual of the moon review. bloodstained ritual of the moon release date. ritual of the moons palette notoriously morbid. ritual of the blood moon. morrowind blood moon ritual of the gifts. ritual of the new moon. curse of the moon ritual of the night. ritual provisions moon batch. ritual for the full moon. ritual new moon june 2018. grand ritual of the black moon. ritual full moon june 2018. ritual for full moon october 2018. ritual of the new moon wow. bloodstained curse of the moon vs ritual of the night. ritual of the harvest moon. ritual of the harvest moon blood magic. ritual full moon january 2018. bloodstained ritual of the moon. ritual full moon bath. spirit of the moon remember ritual. ritual of the moon review. ritual of the new moon recipe. ritual for full moon lunar eclipse. ritual of the moon steam. waters of the moon ritual. ritual for full moon july 2018 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. Talking about R o t M: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G6p8dAscTkI've given many talks where I discuss Ritual of the Moon. Sometimes it is easy and sometimes it is hard. I gave a 15 minute talk specifically on RotM, a "mid-mortem", at the Queerness and Games Conference in Los Angeles in 2017. I used to be very scared of public speaking (skip classes where I had to speak level scared of public speaking) but I am thankfully mostly over it now. But sometimes it comes back. I can't figure out a pattern to it. QGcon is a generous audience. I had spoken at a previous one with no nervousness. But this time in 2017 I was really full of nerves. I felt like I couldn't catch my breath. I had a flash of "omg am I really going to tell this strangers I've been suicidal before???". I've been talking publicly about mental illness for almost 6 years now. It often feels like a script, devoid of any feeling. But sometimes it bubbles up. Here it did. I even thought the talk itself was really good - maybe the best designed one I had planned so far. It became a paper that I'll save talking about for another daily reflection. Maybe it was the wealthy, sterile environment of USC, maybe it was my period, maybe it was the alignment of the stars, but I couldn't catch my breath. I can't bring myself to watch the recording of it to see if it is noticeable in my voice, (but you are welcome to do so and play investigator!). Two weeks ago I spoke briefly about Ritual of the Moon at GDC. When I was asked to be a part of the micro-talks I had a strong flash of panic. GDC's audience is not so generous. Each speaker is individually ranked which is horrifying. I knew the room would be packed with hundreds of people. But on the day I wasn't nervous like I expected. It felt like no big deal. So not a big deal that I felt quite empty after. What is the point of talking about these things? So few people will actually play the game. Am I destroying the experience of the game by explaining it to them instead? Will they get their fill of this idea just by hearing what it's about? I made very pretty slides though, so that's nice. (I'll save those too for another reflection). 18 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.. On Achievements: I was pretty adamant that there would be no achievements in Ritual of the Moon. I hate achievements in all videogames. I think they, at best, annoying and meaningless, and, at worst, a representation of the way most videogames create a loop of work and false reward in order to make the players feel productive, a mandatory feeling under neoliberalism. Ritual of the Moon is about self-reflection, and daily habits, not work and reward. There are no celebratory flashing lights or music cues that make you want to play again and again. It is modelled after ritual and meditation, where the only reward is being more emotionally in-tune (which sometimes is not an award!). But last week I was like, well what if instead of thinking about them as "achievements" which does not make sense for this game, I think about them as markers of the narrative progress. There is nothing in the game that pops up and says "you made this choice! so this is what will happen!" so the Steam achievements do that work. Other than the first one which is an achievement for playing for 7 days, each achievement marks a change in narrative path you are on. I think the moment they pop up will be distracting, but I actually like the signalling of different paths and options. Of course, only the Steam version will have achievements. If you are like me and dislike achievements but are interesting in the splitting of different story paths, I've attached the achievement doc here so if you play on mobile or itch, you can refer to it. 5 days until release.. The Title: Four years ago I was at GDC like I am now. I had been working on preproduction on Ritual of the Moon, then called Moon Witch, and I found out that I got a grant to make it. This was my first major arts grant so I was very excited. But since I was at GDC, I felt immense pressure to make an indie successful popular game. In fact, Moon Witch was a normal videogame; it had an inventory, mini-games, and cut-scenes. It wasn't until I was on the plane ride home, away from GDC, that I had a breakthrough in my thinking about it. I decided to work with my favourite artists, who are not game artists or animators, make it art and not a "game", hold it to my own standards, not indie culture's, and to make it something the artists and I would want to play. Decidedly un-GDC. This photo is from when I was brainstorming new titles in my journal on the airplane.. Raw Scans: To make the visuals of Ritual of the Moon, artists Rekha and Julia handcrafted objects and sourced materials, scanned them, and digitally manipulated them. Here are some of the raw scans. There are the crystals and runes, clay molds, wire weaving, my hair, broken computer hardware, a crystal, and very creepy bottles i made. 6 days until release.
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