Palette & Mood

Locked, finally. Three colours, one texture, one grain. Théo and I argued about it for a month and then agreed in twenty minutes once we stopped talking about "colours" and started talking about what the shore feels like.

The whole look answers to one word: wabi-sabi. Weathered, humble, incomplete, quietly beautiful, going. Nothing new-looking. Nothing crisp. Everything a little worn by salt and use — because that's Bissett, and because it's the visual argument for the game (see Design Pillars): a beauty that's in the disappearing, not despite it.

the target — wet slate, a red that's almost brown, bleached weed, and light that's honest about the hour

The three colours

Moss / oxblood / bone. That's the entire palette and I'm not adding a fourth no matter what August-me thinks.

Moss #6E7B52 — the greens of the shore: algae felt, thrift, the mosscap limpets, the damp north faces of stone. Bracken-green, never emerald. The colour of things that grow in the wet and the cold.
Oxblood #5C1A1A — the reds: oxblood dulse, the bishop's-bead anemone, rust on the mooring chains, the inside of the light. A red that's already halfway to brown, halfway to dried. Never a fresh red. Nothing bleeds bright here.
Bone #E7E0CE — the neutral and the paper: the almanac pages, bleached bonewrack, shell, old whitewash, fog. Warm off-white, oat, the colour of a page that's been handled for years.

the two that carry the emotional load — moss and oxblood against each other, which is basically the whole game's mood in a swatch

Riso, because Théo prints riso

This is the good luck of making a game with a riso printmaker: the palette isn't an abstraction, it's ink he owns. The look is built from real risograph separations, and it maps almost one-to-one:

Moss → Riso Moss (it's a real drum colour, which felt like a sign)
Oxblood → Riso Burgundy, overprinted with a light pass of Black to drag it browner and deepen it (Burgundy alone reads too wine, too purple)
Bone → not an ink at all — it's the stock. An oat/bone-toned paper showing through. On screen, it's the base layer everything prints onto.

Théo's actual drum tests — the misregistration is the point, don't "fix" it in engine

The texture I want to preserve above all: misregistration and grain. Riso never lines up perfectly — the moss and the oxblood pass sit a hair off each other, and that tiny slippage is the entire soul of the medium. It reads as handmade, imperfect, alive. If the in-engine version ever looks perfectly registered, it's dead. See Théo — this is his instinct and he's completely right.

The screen look (Unity)

Translating riso-on-paper to a screen without it going flat and digital:

A subtle halftone / screen-dot overlay to fake the riso dot at close range.
35mm film grain over everything — Portra 400 grain for the daylight pools (warm, forgiving), pushed HP5 grain for the interiors and the dark scenes (grittier, higher contrast). I've shot both for years; the grain is muscle memory.
A faint paper fibre layer under the UI so the almanac feels like stock, not glass.
Slightly crushed blacks, lifted a touch — nothing is pure #000, the way nothing on a real coast is pure black. There's always weather in the shadow.

Moss, oxblood, bone. A page that's been handled. A red that's already halfway gone. Two ink passes that don't quite meet. If someone screenshots the game and it looks like something Théo pulled off a drum and left to dry on the kitchen table — that's it. That's the whole art direction, and I can stop now.