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A few days ago on April 14th, i released my latest game, Souvenirs, on itch.io as part of the Tiny Keepsake Jam hosted by Junk Food Games. It's a pen & paper role-playing game for one player about going on a week-long vacation and writing a journal of the places you visit, and most importantly the items you get as souvenirs during your trips.
It isn't a big game by any means (being rather short and not too complex was part of the jam's constraints after all), but this release is still pretty important to me as it is both the very first journaling game i make, and also a first experiment around design ideas and themes that i've been daydreaming about for a few years. It is a first step towards a still-pretty-much-undefined bigger project about being a tourist and working on it was a very fun process that spawned many seeds of ideas for the future.

I wanted to write for a bit on what working on Souvenirs made me think about, where it's coming from and where i might be going from there. So here is sort of a, i don't know, post-mortem? artistic statement? case study? rambling? about different aspects of this little game.

# How much gameplay is enough gameplay?

When i started working on Souvenirs, i had never played a single journaling game, i had just read a few and i liked the format and the kind of stories it appeeared to allow. I also knew i wanted a relaxing game, that could be experienced over a few short sessions (maybe in real-time, day by day, if the player so chooses) and that wasn't too complex to navigate.
However, one of the first mechanics i wrote was a budget that the player would have: they'd get a partially-random amount of money during the setup of the game that they'd have to balance over the days, and every item that was created would be attributed a price by drawing an additional card and looking at its number (or letter). I thought that this additional mechanic could be interesting because it would be able to replicate that situation in which items in souvenirs shops can often be either woefully overpriced or weirdly cheap, adding another layer of narrative to them; and it also could have created stories of people buying pretty cheap items until the day they find a rare, expensive thing their character really enjoyed and they wouldn't be able to help it, they'd HAVE to buy it no matter the price.

In time however, this system started to feel wrong: while i initially thought it would strenghten the experience by adding more decision-making, it actually drowned it under unnecessary things to stress over (we all need to keep our budget in check, even on vacation, but given the possibility to forget about it, who would want to worry about it?); and most importantly, it tied themes of consumption and finances with memories in a way that didn't feel right. The questions that arose were: should a journaling game have multiple mechanics to make it more game-y? In a laid-back creation-focused experience, how much gameplay is enough gameplay?

And i found that the answer was: not that much! Thanks to encouragement from @btsherratt on Mastodon, i eventually tried and got rid of the entire budget system, and the resulting game was just the same without it, with less card-drawing at any time and less stressing over money but still with decision-making over what item the player wants to get each day; only this time, the choice can be informed by the story they want to imagine instead of what arbitrary numbers constrain them to pick. I really feel like deleting the whole mechanic made the game better at no cost, or at least it's gotten closer to the experience i've been wanting to curate.

# The narrative structure

Souvenirs is a game that's one week -either fictional or real- long. That has seemed a bit long to me at times, and i've added a few words at the end of the rules to let people know they can absolutely modify the rules to make the game shorter for themselves, but i feel like one week is still the best duration for me to express my specific idea of a vacation. I've drawn from personal memories of trips, old and recent, to build the narrative progression of the places the player can visit over that week, and this is roughly the structure i ended up using:

• Saturday: in France, maybe in other countries, or at the very least in my mind, it's common to book campings, hotel rooms or B&Bs between two Saturdays during the holidays. The first visit of the vacation should be near the place you're sleeping at, because you arrive during the day and you don't have as much time as the next days to travel far, and because you want to get familiar with your immediate surroundings.

• Sunday and Monday: the visits on the first two full days of the trip are often the best ones, because you're excited to discover the place, your legs don't hurt from walking too much yet, and you want to start with the best things, the places your friends told you you can't miss or the ones that are really typical from the region.

• Tuesday: it's the middle of the vacation already? This is the day when you do the most ambitious thing of the week, in fear that you won't have as much time or energy later. Of course, this is also the day when you come back late from your visit and you get tired for all the remaining days.

• Wednesday: yesterday was pretty intense, so let's relax for a bit, let's enjoy the scenery or do the silly thing everyone does when they come. At least it'll be fun and not too tiring.

• Thursday and Friday: the last two days, when you realize you wanted to go somewhere that you haven't already and there's not much time left to do so, or you remember you know someone in the vicinity and you meet together, and finally when you start to say goodbye to what's been your neighborhood for the past few days.

• Saturday: time to check out and hit the road to go back home, it's going to be a long day. You probably woke up earlier than you're used to to pack your things in time, and you might lose or break something while rushing...

At the end of the game, the player has to lose one of their items. Vacations are fun but they're never absolutely perfect, and this addition i felt added a somewhat bittersweet note to a game that could have just been too sweet and uneventful. As for the overall structure of the game, i designed it to create a common framework for everyone to follow, so that every player's experience can be different but still evoke the similar mood i was looking for.
And you, how does your vacation usually go?

# A game as a pamphlet

Maybe you've already tried the game yourself, either by purchasing it (thank you!) or claiming a free community copy. Whatever the case, you might have noticed a certain PDF file among the downloadable files named "Souvenirs_Pamphlet.pdf". It's not an especially useful file for reading the game on your screen as the cover for example is the very last page, so why's it here?
Well that's because my original intention with Souvenirs is to make real pamphlets out of it that i can print out on nice paper and distribute in the real world. In fact it's one of the cores of that elusive Bigger Dream Project i was telling you about in the first paragraph: i'm deeply interested in touristic maps, exhibition tickets, shopping receipts & all the other documents we gather while on vacation and in what they can tell about the places we visit. These things hold the stories, architectures and memories of the monuments we tour through, the regional specialties we eat, the festivals and events we visit (or the ones we don't!); plus sometimes they have really fun layouts, small games and whatnot. They are a medium i'd really love to investigate further in future games and Souvenirs was the perfect opportunity to try and explore those concepts, as a game about the things we collect on vacation that's shaped like the pamphlets we collect on vacation. It's not perfect as it is yet, there is still a lot of room for improvement in the layout to really make mine the vocabulary of the pamphlet, but i learned a lot while making it; it's making me excited about the next projects i'll work on with that medium and that's what first experiments are for, right?

Thank you so much for reading all this! I hope it's been interesting and i certainly hope you had, or will have, a lovely time with Souvenirs. What's next for me is figuring stuff out to print the actual flyers, and then i'll start thinking about the next thing!

Have a great day everyone :)

a first prototype of the flyer!