45's Devlog: Part Five (in Which I Discuss One of the Narrative Themes and Stealthily Confess about My Way of Life)

[This is the fifth entry in a series of devlogs for «45», a game I'm currently working on, check out the previous posts here]

I decided to back off a bit and work on the writing and design for a while. This entry should be a good excuse to reflect on the concept and the motivations behind it, since I can't discuss the particularities of the story (so not to spoil the game for whoever is following this devlog).

Anyway, I'm not sure if this is as common as I think but there's a good chance you've encountered someone you'd call double-faced at some point in your life: say in secondary school, a guy who would act polite and reserved when in vicinity of the school staff and would be announced as the exemplary student by teachers in class, and you'd chuckle once you hear that because you know he's nothing like whatever the image he's drawn of himself for the teachers, that he stealthily smokes cigarettes, gathers his friends and go watch porn in the nearby cybercafe after school, and pretty much gets involved in fights every day; or say that guy in college you caught someday with another circle of classmates you thought he didn't even like, acting completely different and more forgiving of their "imbecile behavior", holding a bottle of Stella beer in the middle of the street, the same kind you once mentioned to him and he made naive comments about how beer is made of rotten grapes and discouraged you from ever drinking; or that guy you chill out with every once in a while who's pretty much passive and uninvolved socially or politically, and then you spot him in a photo of a socialist demonstration holding a sign while you were casually scrolling down a news website; or that guy you've never got close to or know anyone who has but who is just always around anyway as an outsider. That guy is pretty much me.

The reason I'm mentioning this is because that's one of the main themes of the game: multiple personas, in my case it bordered on dissociative personality disorder but with the subtle difference that I'm well aware of it, hyperaware of it actually, but with complete depersonalization and lack of the ability to settle or identify with any of those personas. I might be delusional when I say I can even control it to some entangled extent, not in a manipulative or hypocritical kind of way (though I'm not really sure). I've perfected the craft of multiple personas to the degree that it happens with people within the same single groups and gathering places, and aside from the casual suspicion they've been self-involved enough not to care I guess, or was just unconsciously deemed unharmful anyway, well I even have only one Facebook account with all these groups in it and I still manage to maintain those separate made-up self-images in real life. My guess is that it can be easily dismissed as just another guy with an "internet alter-ego", that's why I'm not really bothered by writing about it here. 

Earthbound Zero, one of my favorite games ever

And that's exactly how I've outlined the dialogues and encounters in the game, you would be given the chance to present yourself in multiple ways to the NPCs, with the occasional events that I hope would confront you with the cognitive dissonance such behavior might cause. 

Well shit, that post got more personal than intended, will publish it anyway.