Hazel's Mirror Previous Iterations

Preamble

You may be able to conclude this from the premise of this section, but Hazel's Mirror was not easy for me to conceptualise.

I struggle with planning things ahead of time. Ideas don't come to me in a vacuum, fully formed and complicated. The way that I find ideas I am passionate about is by writing, and exploring, and figuring them out as I'm making them. Creative projects are, to me, a very hands-on process.

I could spend years planning and plotting my next project, carefully calibrating every inch of it - but that would just be a waste of time. I know from experience that, if I want to stay motivated and excited enough to finish making something, I need to surprise MYSELF with twists and turns. Following a plan to the letter gets boring, and I have a lot more fun brainstorming details as I'm making them. (It's how you get cool shit like the "His World" cutscene.)

An unfortunate side-effect of my methods may be apparent. Because I don't know the outcome of what I'm making, I could spend a lot of effort on something and only realise halfway through that it doesn't interest me.

So, I end up scrapping most of what I make. And this SUCKS... but I can refine, and review, and swipe the salvageable aspects into my little tool pouch before burning the rest. Then, when I try again, I have a clearer idea of where I want the project to go.

Failure is awful, but it's unavoidable. I've got to keep a little bit of mystery when making something, and, most of the time, the things hiding behind the curtain are going to crawl out and ruin the entire project. But, sometimes, just sometimes, they step into the light, stand on their hind legs, and I realise this is going to be the best thing I've ever made.

Attempt #1 - The Levelpack

In April of 2023, two important things were happening in my brain:

I was in the midst of another yearly rewatch of the web series Petscop, and I desperately wanted to make something inspired by it. (This was before making my massive Petscop-inspired project Digital Penthouse.)

I was thinking about creating one last custom levelpack for the puzzle game Baba Is You before retiring from the custom-content scene.

These two hyperfixations collided together into a massive, and terrible, chemical reaction; I could make a Baba Is You Levelpack inspired by Petscop!

I called it "Hazel Hotel".

The story itself was promising... but everything else was pretty derivative of its inspiration. If you've seen Petscop, you'll understand that "eccentric pink overworld filled with strange, obtuse puzzles, which hid a dark, bitter, enormous underbelly beneath it that referenced events from the creator's real life" isn't exactly a novel concept.

As well as being derivative, it was far too ambitious. Award-Winning Puzzle Game "Baba Is You" was... how to say... a flawed medium to tell such a story in. I'd have to bend over backwards to get the game to do what I wanted, and it wasn't worth the effort for a story that didn't feel like my own.

The element of the story I liked the most was the theme of abandonment. In this version of the story, the Creator abandoned the game when they became afraid of its complex AI. The in-game clock was left running, and so the characters were still alive, trapped inside. And with the player character "Hazel" stuck in place, waiting for inputs that would never come, all of the characters fled.

I liked the characters and the general plotline - so I swiped them up, and burned the rest.

Attempt #2 - The Article

Seven months later, in November 2023, I saw the video "Killswitch: Haunted Lost Media Or Hoax?" by Izzyzy. The video explores the fake article Killswitch on the Invisible Games website - a creative writing project by author Catherynne Valente. The website hosts many fictional stories about games that were the first of their kind, and have been lost to time, and I highly recommend checking it out!

Something I found particularly inspiring was how these articles were able to allude to a media's complex nature without ever having to show it. A card game can have hundreds of rules, being the product of generations of families playing it - and all you need to do is list a few examples and dare the reader to imagine the rest. You don't have to get caught up in the nitty-gritty of how it actually works. You just need to know that it's complicated, and creative, and fun.

I LOVED this approach. So-much-so that it inspired me to return to the "Hazel Hotel" concept and re-imagine the game as an article written in the same style.

Read the old Hazel Hotel article

Click the button above to read the whole thing, if you're interested.

My favourite part about writing this were the magical spells that Hazel could cast. They were weird, obtuse abilities - barely-useful tools which a hypothetical player was forced to find uses for. The first example is using a "projectile" spell through a looping hallway in order to get the player to shoot themselves. This aspect of puzzle-solving was so utterly delicious to me.

Unfortunately, I didn't love the project. It was perfectly Fine. It was passable. But it was MISSING something. There weren't enough answers to find, or connections to make.

So I did what I do best; swipe and burn.

Attempt #3 - The Blog

I don't have much to say about this one. This was in February of 2024, three months after the last attempt, and I had just read An Unauthorized Fan Treatise, a contemporary fandom murder-mystery written in the style of an online blog. I wasn't particularly inspired by it, but I thought the medium was fun and wondered if I could do anything with it.

It turns out - not really.

I liked the prose, but everything else was terrible. I had no idea where the story was going. I was making things up by the seat of my pants, and it felt like I was running out of breath every time I wrote something.

I didn't swipe anything from this. Just burned it all.

Attempt #4 - The Game Guide

We are now in June of 2025, where I have just finished watching the video "The Bizarre World of Fake Video Games" by Super Eyepatch Wolf.

The main focus of the video is Vermis - a artbook/guide for a game that doesn't actually exist. Through beautiful illustrations and descriptions of enemies, environments and equipment, we're guided through a world of complete misery.

I was enamoured by the "fictional game guide" medium, and the bleak tone, so of course I got inspired and tried to make my own thing based off of it.

See the Concept Art pages for the drawings & pixel art I was making at the time, which more accurately portray the tone.

The plan was to write the first chapter in plaintext, and then beautify it up later with pixel art and flourishes and all that. I never got to the beautifying stage so it looks really boring.

This was really, REALLY close to what I wanted, but there was one caveat: the pacing was all wrong. I wanted the reader to be drenched in a thick, heavy atmosphere, and that didn't work if they could skim-read over everything and be done with the story in fifteen minutes. (Adding the art probably would have helped a little bit, but it just didn't FEEL right.)

I tried pivoting the project into a web-game, making it an interative thing instead of a book. You had to deduce the name of each section from just its length and context clues. This would solve the pacing issue, but it also introduced too many problems of its own. Such as JavaScript. FUCK JavaScript.

It wasn't until I started composing music that everything snapped into place.

Initially, this was another attempt at fixing the lack-of-an-atmosphere problem. "This story would feel a lot more palpable if each chapter had its own background music," I thought. Most of the music from the first section of Hazel's Mirror, The Lost Chapel, was made with this medium in mind.

While listening back to the Guardian Angel boss theme "ANGEL'S ANGEL", I was struck with an idea; it would be SUPER cool if the second half of the page was only revealed once the music reached its climax!

And then I thought... well, wouldn't it be cool if every page was tied to the music? I was reminded of Vocal Marole, an album where each song comes with a new beat of the story, except my version would be more on-rails. Gasp! What if it was a VIDEO! I wouldn't need to code anything!

So, that's how I found the perfect medium for this story. It's an album with still pixel-art images that gradually give details about the world as the protagonist explores it.

The End

And that's where this aspect of the journey ends!

I don't really have anything interesting to say about the development process once I actually found the correct medium. I just worked on it in my spare time and created it in a very stereotypical, uninteresting, incident-free fashion. And I am very thankful for that, but it does mean I have nothing much else to talk about here.