Yang YI

"”You Were Here“ is a short experimental game about looking at the traces of your past self and seeing how they quietly reshape the future you step into. The piece asks a simple question: what happens when the choices you once made return as your only guide forward? Coming from several years of training in polished, production-oriented game development, I wanted to step outside my usual habits and revisit an older system I once built, not to refine it but to reinterpret it. By returning to my previous project and transforming its mechanics, space, and pacing, I treated my own past work as material to rethink. This process became a way to rediscover a more personal and reflective side of making games. The experience unfolds in a series of minimal white spaces. You encounter objects from an earlier moment, decide what to keep or discard, and later walk through a future environment quietly reshaped by those choices. Sometimes a key you kept opens a path. Sometimes a seed you abandoned grows into something unexpected. Sometimes time itself becomes unstable. The entire experience lasts only a few minutes, but is designed to leave a small afterimage of reflection. This is a brief sketch rather than a polished product. It uses interaction, memory, and spatial change to explore how revisiting one’s own past can generate new meaning."