I am not who I was

I AM NOT WHO I WAS

Life is a strange metaphor of roads and paths that we are told to follow & are soon to get lost in. In life we wander into the trees and feel as if there is no purpose as it is not drawn out for us as we had been told it would be. We spend a night in the woods with our greatest fears, which really only consist of our own juvenile lack of knowledge. Once the sun rises we learn we have nothing to be afraid of, we are set free to follow whatever path we please. However, for some they are too ignorant to acknowledge that the sun has risen and will wander around the fauna until they pass away. Others will find their way out of the forest to the place where we had always been told that the grass was a little bit greener, only to find it barren. Others will stay in the forest, some out of spite, some because it is what they are now accustomed to. Others will walk on and question nothing, others will fall to the ground, fill their hands with dirt and question everything.

And some will just enjoy the journey.

DOWNLOAD HERE

Downloadable only for Windows (.exe)

I am not who I was is based off the above text written in the zine of the same name. This video game follows a character through a night in the woods as he fights to make it through the other side. The video game is built to be an engaging element to accompany the story and help its message be digested.

This zine this excerpt is from stands as a testament, and in some ways a counter culture scrapbook to a passed time, this story reflects on personal struggles yet is ambiguous enough to be reflected back into the personal lives of many.

Throughout game play, the script of the zine will be displayed slowly, line by line. The audience will have to survive their long night in order to read the story to its entirety. While engaged, readers will have to decide wither this story is about another person, or potentially about themselves as they wander through this forest. They must decide wither they want to walk away listening to what the story has had to say.

I would't call myself a gamer, but growing up playing Zelda and Pokemon on game boy always stuck with me and I wish I could have had some way to relate them back to my own life with a message.

What I've aimed to create is a video game with a message, something that paints a portrait in your head and lets you leave the game feeling satisfied.

This project was incredibly difficult, I've spent over 20 hours simply watching tutorials on how to do this, little lone time adding sprites and de-bugging. From this I've learned basic video game structure, more GML than you can shake a stick at, pixel based sprite animation, macros, scripts, and workflow within engine based environments.

I have a great amount of respect for developers, lord knows how difficult video game development truly is.