[h3]Stories. What are they? Why are they? [/h3] I like to think that every story is worth listening to and worth writing about. Through every story, we can find a little more about ourselves. After all, are we not all just a collection of stories? When I first heard about the Simpler Times project and talked with Dragos about the game, it felt a bit unreal. Too good to be true sort of thing. I was to write a story about leaving behind your childhood, and moving into another place. The symbolic next step on the journey to becoming an adult. While it didn’t involve trolls under bridges, or legendary swords, it had two main characters: Taina and her bedroom. A simple tale about reality. The story hit close to home, or, should I say, close to my new home, as I had moved out of my parents’ place a few months prior, and I was still discovering what it’s like to be on your own. So every morning I would wake up, brew myself a cup of coffee, cozy up somewhere in my studio apartment, and start writing the story of Taina. By then, I was a bit tired of the whole marvel-esque explosive stories, with villains larger than life. What if the villain was someone we could all understand? What if the villain was not really a villain, but just the fear of change? [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44224897/4dfd5bc6a23cf6d8fde0619c976449cfe2c79c85.gif[/img] [h3]Fear of change[/h3] Things change, but do they really? Think of the turntable. For one generation it was the go to music listening device. Other generations had CDs or cassette tapes. My generation has streaming services. But what is the thing that connects all of us? Music, and how it makes us feel. You see, I believe that the only thing that changes is the way we interact with the world around us, our deeper needs stay the same. After finishing working on the game I wanted to buy a turntable myself, but I remembered my parents owned one that they didn’t use anymore. So I picked it up, fixed it a bit, and now whenever I want to take a break from the world I listen to a record. For me, this process was about discovering the way people used to interact with music, and how that changed over time. From sitting down to listen to a record, to shuffling your Spotify playlist is a big difference, but I’d say that neither is better than the other. That’s why the turntable is there in a way. It shows us how the way we listen to music has changed over time, but why we do it it's for the same reason as always - to listen, to experience, to feel. And that’s also what Taina does. She uses music to think about her life, to remember every small or seemingly insignificant moment that she lived through, and realise that there are many more coming, and they’re all part of something bigger: change. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44224897/8ad0f0ca9e68052ddb6b40463e4c0580ccadeb0d.gif[/img] [h3]Whose story is it?[/h3] Writing for Simpler Times felt easy, natural. I travelled back through my own past and thought about my own curiosities, my own fears, my own experiences. So I poured a bit of myself into Taina’s personality. Remember that in the beginning I said that we are all collections of stories? Well, I left out one word. We are all collections of intertwined stories. Taina’s story is in all of us, and we are all in Taina’s story. I’m sure you can think back to the last time you felt afraid that something would change. That fear is the same in all of us. But I think that the point of this story is to say that change is all around us, all the time. And it’s fine to feel afraid, there’s nothing wrong with that. We are not the same person that we were some years ago, in fact, we are not the same person that we were yesterday. With new experiences, with new stories, we develop into something more. I view Simpler Times as something more than just a story about moving away. It’s a game about our little fears, our small joys, and, in the end, about us. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/44224897/8a5dd731a627ab467f56a9afd3200e16f15039b6.gif[/img]