my experience in creating locations

In this post, I will talk about how I started working on the visual part of the game, dedicated to the adventures of a samurai girl named Yui. This is a visual novel with elements of puzzles and DnD, where players will accompany Yui, the princess of the ancient Asagiri family, who survived the destruction of her family estate. She is forced to flee with her faithful samurai Kenji, who teaches her martial arts and helps her survive.

The game relies heavily on atmosphere and visual style, so I was tasked with creating location concepts that not only reflected the aesthetics of feudal Japan, but also helped convey the emotional state of the characters and the drama of their journey.

Using neural networks to generate references

To start working on locations, I decided to turn to neural networks. I already have enough experience working with industrial programs and settings of Chat GPT 4 for commerce – for example, a chat that writes me content plans for a programming school where I teach graphic design, and after this CP writes posts and video scripts.

I generate images in order to use them in my promotional creatives, I write promos for them in Russian and run them through Google translator.

And so, for now the game is working on the first scene – I want to tell you more about the stages of its creation.

The Asagiri estate has a wonderful garden with a lake. He has two description options: before and after the attack on the clan. When generating the image, I focused primarily on the option in which the garden was not yet engulfed in ashes and flames.

Here is the description according to the technical specifications:

A traditional Japanese garden surrounded by high walls. The garden is small, because the Asagiri clan – people from the samurai class of 1180-1185, rose and became rich not so long ago, and according to the tradition of that time, tries to preach modesty and restraint.
The central part of the garden is occupied by a small pond with crystal clear water. There are wooden paths around the pond. On the sides of the pond there are several cherry blossoms with thick pink flowers that slowly fall off, forming a delicate carpet of petals on the ground. Among the trees are neatly trimmed bushes and small stone lanterns. In the background you can see a cozy tea table under sakura and a small family temple. The atmosphere of the garden is calm and peaceful.

Based on this description, I created the following industrial product:

A traditional Japanese garden surrounded by high walls. The central part of the garden is occupied by a small pond with crystal clear water. There are wooden paths around the pond. On the sides of the pond there are several cherry blossoms with thick pink flowers. There are neatly trimmed bushes among the trees.

As you can see, I reduced the number of details, deciding that, for example, I could fit in the table under the sakura myself. These are small details, and there is always a high probability that the neuron will ignore them.

We run the promt through the translator, we get the first pool of images:

Well, overall – not bad. But I would like to make the pond more streamlined and round. Plus – the temple was lost in the image – I forgot to indicate it in the post.

A strange angle, an incomprehensible building on the left – immediately thrown away.

Nice generation. Only the lake has grown into the grass, instead of a temple we have a piece of an estate sticking out. It won't do.

Where is the lake? No lake. When processing this industrial product, emphasis should be placed on the lake. It would be possible to take the building turned out here as a reference for the temple, but alas, there is no lake(

We are redoing industrial work. The emphasis is the pond in the center (we remove the clarification about its size – we’ll still have to draw everything by hand later, we’ll fix it), behind it is the temple.

A traditional Japanese garden surrounded by high walls. The central part of the garden is occupied by a pond with crystal clear water. There are wooden paths around the pond. On the sides of the pond there are several cherry blossoms with thick pink flowers. There are neatly trimmed bushes among the trees. Behind the pond is a small Japanese style building.

You can, of course, come up with something else, but this option completely satisfied me. We launch the neural network. Let's look at a bunch of pictures again:

To be honest, this is an option that completely satisfied me. They wanted to and the walls around the garden disappeared, I thought that I would calmly finish them myself. Compositionally, everything is in its place: a pond, cherry trees, bushes, a small temple. I will convert the stone paths into wooden ones myself. Below I will show you which frames I filtered out and why.

There is no temple. In general, initially I really liked this picture – I think I’ll definitely use it somewhere. In principle, it would be possible to include a temple here – but I already chose the first option and it was clearly more visual.

Square pond 🙁

Very nice, but the pond is oddly shaped. The walls are there, but there is no temple.

And besides, I decided on the reference. Now let's talk about drawing techniques.

Stylistics: watercolor and line technique

For this game I chose a watercolor technique with ink line, inspired by the anime “The Tale of the House of Taira”. This style is simple, understandable, and rhythmic. It is not difficult to use even if you draw more than a dozen images using the same technique. Watercolor is great for conveying glow and aerial perspective. Due to the saturation of colors and the boldness of the line, depth is created in the picture.

In addition, simplifying the setting and appearance of the characters gives wide scope for displaying the emotions of the characters. Yuya’s adventure is far from going to buy flowers; the heroine herself is an emotional and strong daughter of her father. I believe that thanks to this technique I will be able to reveal the full range of her emotions in the future.

I draw my work in Clip Studio Paint. There's a wonderful set of watercolor brushes that behave almost like they do on paper. I love to paint using watercolor techniques, both digitally and traditionally.

Based on the reference from the neural network, I made a sketch: