reverse_commit postmortem

this post contains spoilers for reverse_commit. it is recommended that you play the game in its entirety before reading this post

wow holy shit i actually made a game. its been a few days since upload and im still a little in shock that i actually did it.

i have wanted to make games before, and ive had lots of ideas for many different types of games. out of everything, though, visual novels appealed to me as a way to combine my skills in both illustration and writing. it was just a matter of starting, which as many people know, executive dysfunction can throw a myriad of wrenches into the process of starting and continuing a project.

the toxic yuri vn jam 2 crossed my tumblr dashboard one day, and it seemed like a perfect opportunity to light the fire under my ass (or, officially, strap on the bomb collar) and get to work actually making something instead of just saying i was going to make something. and now, a month and a half later, reverse_commit is the labor that was born from the threat of that bomb collar. it feels a bit surreal to say that ive finally not only started a project, but saw it all the way through to completion.

in honor of this momentous accomplishment, and the fact that i love talking about myself, i wanted to share a bit of the process with everyone!

forming the idea

i had an idea before what would eventually become reverse_commit about a person who meets a girl online and starts an extremely toxic relationship with her before a big twist happens later (im not going to spoil it, as this is a game i would still like to make eventually). i had even started writing outlines of this idea. however, the jam officially started and it turned out there was a genuine theme this year of "psychosexual trauma". i figured my original idea wouldnt really fit this theme, so i decided to shelve it and come up with another idea.

i talked with a few of my friends and the possibility of exploring being detrans came up. as of about a year ago, i have reidentified and consider myself detransgender after identifying as transmasculine for 13 years. it was a pretty scary and isolating process, but thanks to the love and support of my friends and family, it was not as horrifying of an experience as it could have been. another friend of mine, blaisethebrash, mentioned the possibility of making it allegorical if talking directly about detransition felt too raw.

adjacent to this, the drone community online has been a fetish i have been on the periphery of for basically my entire adult life. especially as someone who is disabled, i found a lot of excitement and comfort from the idea of being made a useful, mind-controlled servant who directly serves some kind of superior (and also latex is hot idk). it was also nice to see a lot of other trans people who found comfort in dronification as it did for me at the time.

from these two concepts, the extended metaphor of dronification for transition and reversion for detransition came into existence, and the very basic idea for my game had come into fruition.

dev hell

before actually, officially writing a script, i wrote a pretty basic outline for the world of the game and the characters within it. there were a lot of ideas i ended up scrapping, such as the mind control aspect. despite it being a pretty central part of the dronification fetish, it was really hard to incorporate it in such a way that didnt carry some eyebrow-raising implications in context of the metaphor of being transgender. as a result, this was scrapped really early on. augmented humans, or cyborgs, were also intended to have a more prominent place within the story and metaphor as a comparison to non-transition medical procedures, but ultimately was outside the scope of the game.

a lot of my earliest ideas were tinted by a desire to not throw trans people under the bus. i still consider myself non-binary and trans to some degree, and most of my closest friends are transgender and transsexual people. the last thing i ever wanted to do was embolden people to see dronification itself as the blame for vans feelings. i mellowed out about this pretty early on, but i had a lot of beta readers and playtesters who are trans to look over things and ensure that i was still being fair.

elexis's role in the story changed over the course of planning. initially, she was van's ex, and the two would be on amicable terms. during this time, an early version of noa would have been elexis's partner instead. after this, i planned on her and van to still be together for the entire story. i ultimately settled on having them break up as a major story plot point. elexis was always meant to resemble the "well-meaning loved one" who struggled to relate or understand but still wanted to try and help, even if the help causes more harm than good.

noa, as mentioned before, was originally going to be elexis's partner, but once i decided elexis and van would still be together, noa's character took on a life of its own. eventually i settled on it being van's primary source of comfort and advice about her reversion feelings. in my own life, a lot of people who gave me the most sound advice about my own detransition were older trans people, and i channeled a lot of those people into creating noa. noa was sort of my love letter to these people who gave me fantastic insight and helped me reframe a lot of the helplessness and shame i felt surrounding my decision. it honestly makes me really happy that noa has become a fan favorite of sorts for this reason.

ripley was an extremely last minute addition to the game. i wanted van to be put in a situation trying to find people who would make her feel "normal" while also trying to find people who would maybe understand but ultimately fell short. ripley also ended up resembling a lot of the invasive questioning that any gender-weird person can recall experiencing.

the plot... exists? any event that ends up happening in the story was ultimately in service of putting van in situations to get upset at. the only semblance of a plot beat was van and elexis's breakup. does this make the game weaker? maybe. i personally really struggle with writing linear stories and plots, and decided eventually to just write scenes that were loosely tied together in order to justify writing out van's thoughts and feelings. the club scene was the very first scene i came up with, and van's interaction with ira was the second. everything else kind of came to me the more i wrote.

actual script writing took me about 2 weeks of 1-2 hour sessions every other day or so. i used neovim for this. ive found that neovim is really good for me to just get words down, as theres no formatting or anything else to fuss with. the script was written out of order, and i just wrote scenes as i developed ideas for them. at the end of those 2 weeks, i had roughly 17,000 words written. this is the most i have ever written for any project ever. proofreading didnt see many changes besides ensuring tense continuity and changing some awkward sentences.

next up, the art, and oh man. rendering latex was such a pain in the ass. i think i did it in a way that compliments my style, but it was a nightmare. noa's sprite specifically, which has many different gestures and multiple outfits, took multiple days to figure out a way to easily export the sprites i needed. im pretty proud of how all of them turned out, though!

the goal was to have two cgs (a second one where van cracks her lens), but i ended up getting super burnt out and being unable to make something i wanted. ultimately, it got scrapped. i wish i had the capacity to make more than one cg, but i guess theres always next time?

the main menu track and the track that plays during van and elexis's breakup was composed by blaise. i really like both of these songs a lot! the heartbeat being present in the song and the heartbeat being present in van's flashback was completely unintentional, but i think ultimately added to the game. i also had the idea of arranging the main menu song for piano to play as the credits music. this arrangement took me about an hour to compose and record. i recorded myself closing the piano as well, as i thought it would be a good sendoff for both the song and the vn.

release and closing thoughts

the game was released with about half a day to spare. as i had gone to a huge irl event the weekend before, i had to power through some exhaustion and ultimately burnt myself out a little bit. its unfortunate, but it is what it is.

theres a lot of things i like about the game, as well as many things i would have done differently. as someone whos primary writing experience was prose, i learned a lot about how to adapt my style to a vn. i would have probably tried a bit harder to make something comparable to a plot. i would have omitted a lot of text in service of showing it instead. all of these things and more i hope to bring to whatever vn i work on next.

despite how hard i am on my own work, ive gotten a lot of good feedback about my game, and a lot of people seem to really appreciate that it exists. despite the fact that i know its not as good as i would have liked it to be, i found that a lot of people were happy that it was a tangible game you can play at all. theres not a lot of art focused on detransition, and im happy that i was able to make something that did. despite all its flaws, i made a game in a fucking month and a half! thats crazy shit!

special thanks to my friends who either helped directly with the vn or just encouraged me even when i wanted to burn it all down, including blaise and figura (go play coils right now. its really fucking good and i also helped playtest it.)

after a break, im going to bang out another vn, and hopefully this one will be even better. so stay tuned! and if you havent already, please play reverse_commit. thank you for reading!