Esoteric Update #252 - Ugh, It's 2024?

Ah, so it is time for a new update... I'm unsure how to approach this, so be patient with me; I might ramble a bit.

Firstly, I have to unfortunately say that the end of the year seems to have become an awful time for my mental health. For whatever reason it's when the most bad things happen and I am stuck alone with my thoughts the most. As such, I have to say I'm not really feeling the best. However, regardless of how I feel about this new year starting, I would like to wish you all the best in this year 2024 of our Lord and Saviour Cthulhu, as well as a belated merry Mithrasmas.

I would also like to come clean that I have damaged one of the game files, managing to override the map I made somewhere around last Monday. Unfortunately, at the point I noticed, I couldn't revert far back enough to get the map back. I did recreate part of it once more, based on my notes, but it's just something I feel monumentally stupid about.

Apart from that, I've worked on a variety of things. Mostly involving getting that adventure rolling (you can see a text document detailing most of the contents of the adventure if you would like to see what we're trying to accomplish), but I think that, with how things are going, the write-up gives only a limited view of what we're working on. Regardless, we've been working on many things revolving around this adventure, fixing errors, expanding things (perception) and, in one case, rebuilding a whole system. That one system that got scrapped and redone was our approach to lighting, which just turned out to be inadequate to what we needed to realise our plans. It's a much more complicated system now, but that's fine. It works the way it needs to work now.

We've also swung for some more assets and decided to leverage our overall asset library towards something unexpected. Randomly generated books. It's not exactly that we'll be generating whole books with content you can read, but rather just covers. And the idea is to populate bookshelves with readables that don't exactly mean much for the character but provide noise. The idea of an information-based game and how noise is vital to such a game has already been discussed by us before, and this is just an extension of the concept.

But I won't get into the system too much. Just have some results instead:

And just to make things a little more interesting, I later added cross-compatibility between page filters and covers (the formats were not 100% compatible before; the filters would show up but not render correctly):

Well, for the moment, it's back to work, but I plan to take some time off very soon and once more try to focus on the game. I wish I had more people to work with. But at the very least, if you've read so far, do you have something positive to say about my work? I would much appreciate it.