Developer Reflection

Constructing Revealing Selves has been an extremely personal and immersive process.
I aimed to craft a narrative of identity, memory, and healing from the inside out—
not expositorially or through conventional narrative, but through broken experience.
I wanted the player to feel what it's like to be navigating through someone's subconscious,
peeling away the skin of a broken self.

The mechanism of gameplay was taken from a hero who woke up without remembering anything,
stuck in limbo with symbolic objects—i.e., talking beasts and constantly changing landscapes.
The central conceit was that reviving memory would not be logical or sequential
but atmospheric, emotive, and sensual. I specifically used second-person (i.e., "you")
in an effort to place the player into the world of the hero and create an overwhelming
sense of personal connection.

The most challenging aspect was balancing vagueness and specificity.
I didn't wish to spell it out in black and white—emotional resonance is based
on unobtrusive perception, not screaming epiphany. Yet I had to sow enough narrative
breadcrumbs that the players wouldn't be completely lost. I rewrote a number of the
dialogue scenes, especially in Memory 2, to better the rhythm and have the protagonist's
emotional progression feel organic and necessary.

On a design level, I experimented with non-linear narrative. The game features a series
of "Memory Realms" which the player may progress through in whatever order they choose,
and between which there is some gentle motif of link. Each memory exists as not just
a puzzle or piece of story, but instead a fragment of the protagonist's broken sense of self.
The larger narrative curve is one of self-discovery: the heroine starts out mute,
pieces together fragments of emotional truths, and gradually finds out what they had
concealed from themselves.

In addition to writing the narrative, I experimented with cross-media interaction.
Using the vehicle of a Neocities frame easily built, I presented the game in a hypertext setting,
and set up Twitter/X posts as subjective subconscious moments experienced in first person.
This allows me to break down the boundary between game and player, fiction and medium.
Each of these, in turn, forms an embedded world that frames the embedded thesis of
fragmentation and self-constitution.

In doing so, I've become more at ease with composing narratives based on mood and interior
sense as opposed to traditional plot. I learned to craft prose that affected on an emotional
level without detailing everything, and how to construct ambiguity into useful purpose.
Most of all, this project made me remember that storytelling is not always world-building—
it can be about re-building the self.

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