Morning, y’all!
Here’s your weekly update. Work on the examples is finally (almost!) done—I’m revising the last three or four pages today. I’ll give you a little peek at the process in a moment. But first, I want to propose a collective creative exercise.
I’m going to give you the exact set of elements I used for one of the examples in the book, and I’d love for you to interpret them yourself. Leave your take in the comments—I’m genuinely excited to see what strange creations you come up with.
Here they are:
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Subject: Person
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Flavor: Weird
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Seeds: Boiling — Gate — Nose
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Trait: Behavior / Activity
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Shift: Distort
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Framing: Texture / Material
As a recap:
- This should be a person, and they should feel unsettling, absurd, or bizarre.
- Their inspiration should come directly, metaphorically, or sideways from boiling, gate, nose.
- We’ll focus on behavior or activity, and then distort that behavior somehow.
- Finally, we describe the scene with special attention to textures and materials.
Remember:
- Bend meanings freely.
- Discard your first idea if it feels too safe or tropey.
- Go strange. Go big. Go weird.
And at the end of this update, I’ll show you my version—the one that made it into the book. There’s no right or wrong answer. In fact, the more different our interpretations are, the better—that means the tool is doing its job.
So go wild. Create your weirdest person. Leave it in the comments below.
📘 Progress Report
The book is now well into the hundreds of pages—yep, you’re getting a chunkier book than originally planned. But every extra page is absolutely worth it.
The example pages have really elevated the whole project. They act like mini workshops you can follow, and you can even pluck an example out and drop it into your game if you need something ready-made.
Here’s how they’re looking so far:
Colorful, organized, and easy to roll on—since the full 216 examples also form a
rollable table. I originally thought I’d draw on each page, but these spreads are very text-heavy, so color-coding them by Subject and keeping the focus on usability felt like the right call.
Still a few details to polish and another revision pass to go—but things are looking good. Really good.
🎉 Creator Day 2025
On a extra note, today is Creator Day on itch.io—the day where creators receive 100% of the proceeds from all sales. And since it overlaps with Black Friday, tons of creators are running special deals right now.
It’s an amazing time to support your favorite indie designers (or discover new ones!).
If you’re interested in any of my other games, I’m running a
one-third off sale on everything today. You can head over
through this link and help yourself.
As always, I deeply appreciate the support.
🧟♂️ My Interpretation:
Here’s the example I created from the prompt above:
The Boiling Gatekeeper
His skin steams faintly in cold air, pores opening and closing like tiny valves. He guards the city’s north gate but never touches the iron—claiming it “burns wrong.” When people pass, he inhales sharply through his nose and mutters the scent of their intentions: "envy, travel, debt."
What do you think?
And more importantly—what will you create? I can’t wait to read your interpretations.
That’s it for today. Thank you so much!
Talk soon!
—Cezar
