Process

The Wanderer is a little bit of an enigma, even to me. I haven’t really been able to nail down who or what he (if he is even proper) is. Going back to the beginning, his design came halfway out of necessity. I wanted to get back into Game Maker Studio 2, of which I had dipped my toe into the previous year with my first attempt (click for peak game design) at learning to create a simple platformer, and so I needed a character that was distinct but simple enough to make with a finite palette and pixel count. After looking through some older games to see what their solutions were to the same problem, I landed on a ‘black mage’ style character. You know the type, little guy, big hat, two big eyes.

Rather unusually, it was only after creating what he looked like that I started trying to figure out who he was. I knew he was some kind of traveller from the beginning, ‘The Wanderer’ is actually a sort of interim name as a friend told me my first name, ‘Xitu’ (ZEE-TOO) probably wouldn’t work seeing as several languages pronounce ‘Xi’ with a ‘shh’ sound at the beginning.

For a while I hemmed and hawed about Xitu The Wanderer’s purpose, for a while I was wanting to be a spirit of the forest that had either become curious or had somehow been misplaced, travelling back home, other times he was travelling further into his forest to right some wrong that had happened, some unbalance. But every version still felt… off. I still haven’t completely hammered home who he is, though the next direction that I plan on taking him is one where we don’t really need to know anything about him. Taking inspiration from games such as ‘Gris’ and ‘Inside’, I think that it’s more about his environment and his experience of it, rather than who he is from the beginning.