Something I would have liked to have done: originally, the premise of this setting was that it should be situated around 1888, but every time a leap into the war dream / Dead Land occurred, the tech level of society would shift to a later historical period, up to ww1, ww2, collapse of the British Empire etc. I abandoned this when I discovered I knew very little about The Boer War lol and also could not find any good videogame pictures of even 19th century era art assets - really, beyond The Order 1886 and the Assassin's Creed Victorian London setting there are just not many mainstream 19th century videogames.
The visual look of the war dream landscape is inspired originally by an old shooter I played called Painkiller (2004), in the expansion the final level entitled Hell depicts a war frozen across time from ancient siege engines to trench warfare. A good recent visual reference for the look I had in mind is probably Battlefield 1 (I have not played this, the last few games I played were Bad Company and Battlefield: Hardline) but this is the no HUD video I watched
Battlefield 1 gameplay no HUD immersion: Passchendaele
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REqMPFd9o3cTwo other cinematic references are Lawrence Of Arabia (1962) and Dr Strangelove (1964). The idea of machine consciousness split between two bicameral halves war/desire, Mortmain / Odalisque etc I suppose was done in Neuromancer, but the theme is pretty old - I think there was an old film/sci-fi novel with a war computer called Colossus that deployed this theme. The look of Mortmain and his obsession with hands comes from the Artstation protest lol, the artists deliberately drew lots of art to ridicule the AI difficulty in depicting hands and fingers lol though obviously inpainting has improved this over the mere course of a few months. As always in my games, the Unseen Hand is probably the invisible hand analogy of Adam Smith beloved by economists hehe
