28012025

Spent the day working on a new scene mockup. I’ve decided to use colour after all to highlight the player character. Each character will have a distinct colour associated with them, in order to both render them visually distinct from one another given the tiny player model sprite and the otherwise-monochromatic palette, and to help them stand out more immediately in the environment, which was a significant point of criticism for Work (although it functioned a lot differently there, and was intentional in that effect). Those colours will, for now, be the only colours present.

I’m not sure if I want to dedicate tomorrow to writing the January update for Work, or instead spend the day making another scene instead for Plan, so I can have at least three images to show in the Work update. The next mockup will be for UI-related stuff. I have a pretty exciting idea for the character selection screen already, inspired by the radio broadcast loading screens from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre game. I don’t think that’ll be the one I work on though tomorrow.

I’ve found some inspiration in two unlikely sources: Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas, and Plastiboo’s Vermis, both of which I picked up around the same time last year but didn’t get around to actually looking at until just this afternoon. I finished Vermis in one sitting and found some of the presentation very interesting (although the majority of the narrative content was pretty run-of-the-mill dark fantasy stuff, not to a fault, but just not particularly inspiring). Nazi Literature — which is an unfortunate abbreviation — is also quite interesting so far, and structurally/tonally, I find it very inspiring so far. Thematically there are some shared threads with Plan, in the focus on the lives of deranged and morally dubious individuals who believe themselves to be uniquely ambitious or gifted in their visions, but whose efforts largely just end up being swept away into the collective dustpan of artistic mediocrity. Reading it makes me want to give 2666 another try.