In trying to make an interesting world for the player to explore, I relied on things I wanted to convey. One of those things was that the culture of the game environment was, at the time of its demise, was obsessed with distraction.

Actually, I just wanted to make some cool posters. Something you can plaster all over the walls. I had a dead world I needed to fill with life and existence.

I was inspired by the things Remedy does with in-universe media. How they use it to create a larger world by alluding to these pieces having a deeper lore and fandom within the game's universe. I also took note from how movies such as Robocop and Sorry To Bother You use advertising and TV shows to further drive their themes and motifs. I don't think I've read a book that does similar things, but I'm open to suggestions.

So I made fake movie posters.

The reason I made so many movie posters is, well I had a lot of fake movies laying around. Most of these were from an old project called Watching Movies With Friends. The point was to literally pick out a movie to watch while you were at a friends house, and the two of you would rip on it. The idea was to be consistently funny or else your friend would eventually kick you out after too many bad jokes. After the movie you ended up having an earnest discussion with your friend.

What I ended up doing for the movies, was dumping a ton of random information into a predictive text generator and let it churn out dozens of fake movies, complete with synopsis. This meant when I ultimately scrapped the project I was left with all these fake films with little purpose.

I didn't just throw the text 'Space Dog: Way of the Astronaut' on an image and slap it around the level either. Since the game is mainly about exploring a time capsule, I wanted these incidental visuals to be meaningful in some way. Not everything directly ties to the plot or has sentimental value, but there should be enough information present to allude to a larger universe and some kind of story.

For example, Outrageous Biology is literally just gremlins but skeletons. However, I wanted to connect it to the idea that movies, are nothing more than a vehicle for advertising. So the executive producer on this movie is a soda company. It would be similar to how Batman & Robin was designed and made specifically to sell toys & other merchandise. It didn't necessarily start off that way, but as the creative process gets funneled through a capitalist lens, the heart of it gets pushed aside.

  

Not all of this needs to be blatant (though I gotta admit, I'm usually terrible at subtext), but the ideas need to be communicated.

TL;DR Paying attention to detail pays off when world building. Or whatever, I'm not an expert.