I Am This Castle is a single-player story-driven adventure game written and created for LGBTQIA+ young adults and older, written, designed and built so that anyone can enjoy it.

You can find more information about the game and my plan to build it at the link!

This game has many purposes, and I am so happy to share them with you!

1. This game's purpose is to improve societal attitudes towards transgender people and to make the world a safer place for them.

   How can a videogame do that? A videogame can do that by creating a story, a space, inside of which anyone and everyone can explore deep questions about the nature of their inner life and identity. This game is an emotional but ultimately safe haven for the trans community, one of the most vulnerable demographics in the world, and to which I myself belong.

2. This game’s purpose is to create a safe haven for young transgender people seeking to understand and accept themselves through play, to encourage them toward their own unique understanding of identity with a game made specifically for them.

3. This game’s purpose is to lift up those transgender people who have run out of words, have run out of resilience, or have run out of tears, to provide a joyful resource for their family, their friends, their school or their children to understand them and their unique challenges.

4. This game’s purpose is to promote a sense of shared humanity and demonstrate that the experiences of transgender people are emotionally comprehensible to anyone, and that our stories can offer unique insight into what it means to be human.

This game is about thinking deeply on the nature of existence, identity, belonging, friendship, love, loss, emotion, grief, wonder, joy, belonging, community, and many more. The game is principally delivered through dialogue choices between you as the player and a curated selection of other characters, representing fictionalised versions of the people who made me who I am today, while you adventure through fantastical landscapes and situations that are handcrafted to guide you on a personal journey.

You can expect to be transported to a fantastical original world with an exceptional level of narrative storytelling, where you will play through a series of allegorical fairytale adventures whose key moments, experiences and emotions are inspired by both the wonderful, and also the challenging, events of my life as a transgender woman.

You can expect to be moved by the human experience of building yourself up to the expectations of others, only to find that the gap between your expectations and theirs has created a set of circumstances that dooms you to failure, before looking deep within and accepting the truth of your own identity, whatever that may be for you, personally.

Sound familiar? It should, because the human experiences of transgender people are just like anyone else's! Come and join me to learn just how similar we all are, and just how much we can learn from one another, friend.

For the same reason you might play a game about being a great hero, a vampire, an alien or a goose; because as a human being you have an incredible natural ability to understand the experiences of others through the lens of your own life. Your imagination is a vehicle that allows you to travel through (and into) time, space, places, worlds, or the mind and body of another being. There, in the minds of others, we repeatedly learn throughout life that we are not so different from one another, and that understanding can come so much more easily, and safely, than we could have imagined. You already travel like this every day, whether through a discussion with your co-worker about their life, in the text of your books, the movies you watch, actors on a stage, or while playing a videogame.

As humans, we’re curious creatures who can't help but be intrigued by other people’s lives. It's human nature to be moved by stories, to try and guess the ending, to reconcile a story with what we think we know, to marvel when a story takes us to a place we’ve never been before, and for our hearts to crumble at stories we’ve heard a thousand times.

I invite you, as a fellow curious, imaginative human being, to experience how similar our lives are, how similar our joys, our fears and our grief, despite the distance between our lived experiences. The writing of this story requires that I open my chest and bear my heart to you, and I believe that you will find that our hearts both beat the same.

Just like a book, a movie, or a chat with a stranger, perhaps by learning a new story, you’ll find a new friend inside.

I am going to share development of my game because my goal is to collaboratively engage with the global community for the purpose of improving understanding of, and compassion for, transgender people.

I don't believe that I can do that without hearing from the world about my project, seeking ongoing feedback, encouraging engagement with my game and its themes, and without relentlessly pushing for the game to be a success. Sharing my process is one of the measures that I will use to keep myself accountable to an audience larger than myself.