You Played Yourself
You Played Yourself is my passion project. It started as a submission to Xavier Ekkel’s Movie Game Jam, and became a much larger project that I have been developing on and off since 2018.
Description:
YouPY is a time-travel comedy adventure game that has players infiltrating a warehouse facility, performing strange dirty-work for extra-dimensional entities. After completing a round of tasks, the player is sent back to the facility again, given different goals - some directly contradicting the tasks that they’ve previously performed. The twist? Their previous self (or selves) are still there, performing the tasks that they’ve performed. In order to succeed, the player must complete their tasks while avoiding their past selves.
A render from the original jam-version of You Played Yourself.
My Role:
My role in You Played Yourself’s development is everything. The only thing in the game that I didn’t do was compose the original game jam version’s soundtrack.
This is a passion project for me - and it’s something that I still actively develop.
Ever since the original jam project, the game has expanded greatly in scope. I’ve spent a lot of time carefully designing different interactions and solving design issues that appear when you develop a time travel game. Time travel in You Played Yourself essentially functions like a replay system - meaning that the player’s actions are recorded, saved, and replayed - though the player is allowed to rewind it and fast forward through the replay. A simple example of an issue that pops up is with doors - and I have a video explaining the issue and my solution here.
Why it’s important:
You Played Yourself is a long term project for me, and throughout its development I’ve fallen into a lot of pitfalls. I have had to cut features that I adored, I’ve had to re-write it’s story, I’ve fallen into the pit of rewriting systems over and over (and crawled out of that pit), etc. While the full version of the game is nowhere close to being done, I think that it’s a project that I’m the most proud of because it not only shows my commitment to a difficult project, but also shows how much progress I’ve made as a developer since its creation. Experiencing these pitfalls first hand allows me to be better at avoiding them in the future.
Development Videos
Demonstrating time reversal, and many previous selves.
Demonstrating Dialog System changes, and a new Objectives System.
Demonstrating a new dialog system.
Download the GAME-JAM Version:
You Played Yourself is something that I am still actively developing - but if you’d like, you can download the original game-jam version below.
