Sometimes an idea seizes you and won't let you go. The Bonsai Diary is one of those ideas.

It started as a reply tweet:

It was just a stray daydream about something I care about a lot: expanding the narrative lens from the individual to the community (over space) or generations (over time). The bonsai, which can famously survive for hundreds of years, makes for a great metaphor. Into my head popped a matching mechanic, and that's when I got a little obsessed.

The core mechanic: trace an image of a tree using strokes of a pen or brush:

1. Start with the image of a tree seedling.
2. Lay a sheet of paper over that image and trace it using only one stroke of the pen/brush.
3. Lay a the next sheet of paper over your tracing, trace the previous image, and add an additional stroke that makes the tree taller and thicker.
4. As you add more sheets, the number of strokes increases. By sheet 10, for example, you should be using 10 strokes to create a pretty thick bonsai trunk.

The natural fit for this kind of game is, of course, a solo journal. I started to imagine the player working deliberately and meditatively in the tradition of Chinese calligraphy or painting. 

A good solo journaling game needs motivation, though. It happened that I was just researching the perfect genre: solarpunk. I mean there's nothing more literally "solar" than a tree! Better still, I wanted a story that arced towards hope, whatever the tribulations along the way. So that became the story: a bonsai, passing from hand to hand, decade to decade, generation to generation.

As I layed out that story, I wanted to open the player up to speculation and wonder about the future. Even before I became a parent who imagines what kind of world my kids would grow up to inherit, I thought about the trees around me and wondered what world they would inhabit. Ultimately, I hope that's the kind of play this tiny journaling game would enable.

This is very much my first try at a solo journaling game, and as timing would have it, the first game of any type I've designed and actually published. It's rough; it's probably hard to use (as I'm reminded as I struggled to explain the core mechanic in this blog!); and I hardly know if anyone even wants this kind of experience. But this was one of those games that came from my soul, not any kind of "market analysis." I hope someone enjoys it.