EXPOSURE 📷 a spirit photograph, London 1891

You're a Victorian spirit photographer, alone in an empty parlor at midnight. You frame the room through an old brass lens, fire the magnesium flash, and take the glass plate into the darkroom. Under the red safelight you stir the developer with your mouse and watch the picture slowly come up. First the fireplace, the portrait, the chair. Then a woman standing in the doorway who was never in the room.

Every plate, she's a little closer. By the fifth one she doesn't need the photograph anymore.

I've always been fascinated by real 1800s spirit photography, where people believed the camera could catch the dead. I didn't want a jumpscare game though. I wanted the dread of waiting in the darkroom and slowly realizing there's someone in the picture you didn't take.

I built it with the Rive CLI and a coding agent. The parlor, the ghost and the whole interface are written as RML and checked with headless renders, which is honestly a wild way to make art. The camera look is a single GPU Canvas shader: the old lens blur, the rippling developer tray, the finished print, and the glass cracking at the end. A Luau script draws the ghost between the layers of the room, so she only ever shows up on the developed plate but never in the live view. Data binding and a state machine run the focus dial, the timer, the captions and the sound.

Then I opened it in the Rive Editor and I turned the moon blood red, signed the parlor by hand, and gave the moon a slow heartbeat on the flicker timeline.

Play it here 👉 https://exposure-6vjhie.rive.to