Welcome to the 52-Card Official readme text file! This will contain some important things that you might like to know before entry, as well as some random mad ramblings relating to development way further down in the doc.

Important Stuff: 52-Card is a text-based 18+ NSFW Existential Eldritch Fantasy Modern College game-story-thing, and the releases of this game are always free. If you paid someone money for this game, you have been scammed. If you wish to upload this game somewhere: feel free to do so as long as you include this readme and do not charge money for it. If you really, REALLY enjoy what you play/read, you can support me at "https://www.patreon.com/LemniscateStories". I'm not in the best spot financially, so any money digitally hurled into my cranium is greatly appreciated. Do not think that just because I would appreciate donations that I will need them to continue working on 52-Card, however. I will continue to write and release 52-Card so long as I am able, until it is completed, with or without support.

Important Stuff Cont.: If you're one of the powerful people that are able to unravel the HTML of this game back into its development file, please do not release it anywhere, as it contains a whirlwind of spoilers and dev-notes that I don't want ruining others' experiences. Transitions are hard. This game does not give sex scenes away for nothing, and not every character is written to be willing to have sex with you upon first meeting you. If you don't go out of your way to make fuck (sometimes via flirting, sometimes not), you probably won't make fuck at all. I hope that the contents within are of high enough quality/intrigue/some third thing that the average person will be able to enjoy it and its characters even if that player manages to side-step having any sex the whole time.

Less Important Stuff: This story might be NSFW and contain smut, but at its core it is still a story. There's no shortage of other games and stories to play and read that have constant sex scenes, they're often pretty good, too. It would bring me no joy, however, to write nothing but 120K words of sex scenes that bleed together. There are a few contrarian choices like that embedded in this project, like the lack of character portraits, or zero customization for your character. I just don't have room for those things in my current vision for this thing, and I'm not an artist.

Less Important Cont.: The no-portrait thing isn't just because I lack the skill, I have a talented artist that draws interpretations of these characters sometimes (the only thing "locked" behind Patreon since I use them as update images sometimes). I don't want a "CANON" image of these characters, I yearn to hear about and see the little differences people have in their heads based on the descriptions of these characters, and adding definitive portraits would kill a lot of that. If you're a heaven-sent artist that makes fan-art, I'm not going to take it and use it, but please share it with me @lemniscatestories.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Just Stuff: There are various influences at play in this thing, Disco Elysium's a more faint influence, and I played my fair share of text-based porn games in the past past. Since this is an NSFW College Game, there's going to be some kind of overlap with other games in that weirdly specific genre. I've put some references in as my version of tribute, some are more blatant of references than others, but I have no intention of knowingly walking the same plot-beats as anyone else's game. This is its own thing, don't expect the same treaded ground, that'd be disrespectful to myself and those that came before me.

Just Stuff Cont.: I'm not going to try to fool you into thinking this game won't have heavy themes. It will. Existential ones, eldritch horror, meta-stuff, and questioning of the self, and what it means to be the self. What does it mean to fit in, if the world itself does not think you belong? That combination of things sounds heavy, and there are serious moments within, but as well as the heavy moments and nightmares inside, there's also light-hearted moments and absurdism and (hopefully) comedic narration. If you want the purest experience of 52-Card possible, play the game through to its current endpoint before reading beyond this point.

Fun Stuff The Author Wanted To Put Here: Red and black are commonly described in this work, which is purposeful, it's like a deck of playing cards. Sometimes I realize I've forgotten to put at least one of these colors on someone, and have to figure out where it fits. That's not the only card-based design choice, as people who enjoy being tarot-nerds could've told you from the fifth page. Although I claim no deep understanding of any of the tarot beyond a cursory knowledge of the Major Arcana, the stats of this game are named after the four suits of tarot.

The 'Coin' stat not being plural is purposeful, also, I didn't want someone to somehow, glue still in their mouth, think that means currency after not reading anything but the stats on the sidebar. That's pointlessly antagonistic, you can eat glue if you want, I won't be upset. The various titles given to characters in-game when looked at after a certain point (THE KING OF CUPS) are also taken from the tarot, but I know NOTHING about the actual cards. This means that any similarities you draw are pure coincidence, born out of my desire not to use a normal playing card deck's suits for stats.

King of Cups sounds cooler than King of Hearts, anyways, and has been used less in media statistically. 2/3 of the people I shared this with say it has things in common with Persona, which I have never played, and know even less about than the tarot, so that's coincidence as well. The name 52-Card is probably pretty obvious to some, but it comes from the imaginary game of similar name. 52 Card Pickup, in which the funniest person in the room hurls playing cards at the floor before informing you to pick them up. Composition Notebook being the default name is genuinely only because of that later moment when you look at your Journal and see those words on the front. I call him Comp for short in my notes. Also in my notes: Quwertee is QWRTY, Rozzwell is Rozz, Sleanne is Slee, and Syllyvana is Syll.

There's going to be a total of five chapters to this thing including the current one, which I've dubbed the pre-chapter, Chapter 0, The-Needlessly-Long-Prologue, whatever you want to call it. If you ignore Chapter 0, that's one chapter per main character, one chapter per suit. The five chapters will take place over one school year with way the fuck too much going on, because it's actually quite hard to make a game like this that spans over four distinct years as it would turn out. I want it noted here as well as anywhere else I specify: the non-main characters are just as valid of love interests as the main characters. To hell with best-girl elitism clinging onto whatever justification it can, just say you like XYZ the most because of ABC, not because they have the coveted MAIN CHARACTER status.

The main characters have some fun developmental facts about them, detailed below:

Quwertee's design changed drastically as I moved from beta to actual 52-Card. At first she was a screen-head girl, you know the sort, but I wanted her to have hair so badly and there was just no way to make that look good on a monitor. Everything other than her design stayed the same, basically. She's my favorite, or at least I think so, since I write a damn storm whenever it's her turn to be written for.

Rozzwell's emotions changed a fair bit from the beta. He was waaaay more dysfunctional of a depressive mess, but that doesn't really work with him having responsibilities of any kind. This way he's a real character and not just a portrait of one emotion, even if he might try to portray himself that way.

Sleanne was originally two different characters, with the OG Sleanne not even being a main character, just a dirty-work doing goon for the real Queen of Coin. But I figured out too much of Sleanne's character in the beta compared to the old Queen, so I merged them into one, and now Sleanne's her present self. She was always intended to be rich, but I didn't have her money's actual, like, origin figured out until writing Chapter 0.

Syllyvana has changed the least, except once I spelled her name as Syllyvanna and I have to check every single time I write it to be safe. At times I need to remind myself that she's not the stuttering loser nerd archetype, but rather a relatively reserved calculating gal instead.

This is the THIRD (or fourth??) readme I've written for the pre-chapter, and this is the last one, even though I wrote that last time too. As of today, late November 2024, there are over 120 thousand words in 52-Card. It's physically impossible to see even half of this in one playthrough. Sometimes that fact makes me smile, and sometimes it makes me exhale and groan like a mummy. Thank you for reading the Official 52-Card readme, and thank you so much for experiencing 52-Card, it means the world to me.