I have been quiet for a while, but back in May I joined Apocalypse Studios as Game Director, to build the design foundation of Deadhaus Sonata, a highly ambitious action RPG title.
Apocalypse Studios (based on the often-misrepresented ancient Greek term that roughly means “to reveal cosmic truth“) was founded by industry veterans behind acclaimed (or even legendary) titles like Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes, and Warframe.
To get a project and publishing deal of this magnitude off the ground is quite an epic ordeal, especially in the current borderline apocalyptic (pun?) industry climate, but there are always small wins along the way.
One of these is the latest episode in our ongoing community-favorite “radio play” series called Chronicles of the Grand Inquisitor, which sets up the lore and background narrative for the dark world of Deadhaus Sonata (the entire series is available on Spotify).
It’s quite captivating and immersive – especially for fans of ornate Lovecraftian horror – but this time it also served as a testbed for some innovative content creation experiments.
This entire episode was illustrated (and even partially edited) using a workflow that involved the extensive use of AI tools and advanced generative AI techniques, enabling a pace of production and iteration that exceeded our wildest expectations.
As a side note, embracing AI and finding the right use cases for it is core to the DNA of Apocalypse: one of our key pieces of technology is an innovative procedural AI-assisted narrative generation framework.
I created all illustrations for the episode using Leonardo AI with a custom-trained model, guidance images, extensive iterative seed re-use, and the awesome AI canvas in/outpaint feature, as well as a considerable amount of compositing in good old Photoshop.
I’m obviously biased here, but I think the atmosphere, and the degree of consistency and continuity achieved turned out to be quite remarkable.
May update: we released two additional episodes continuing both the adventures of our friend Alaric the Damned, and the more stylized visual style. This is the last update I’m adding to this post, as it’s getting quite long and unwieldy.
I’m working on incorporating some new techniques for future episodes, and those will be discussed separately. In the meantime, have fun with these:
February 28 update: the 4th episode in the series has just been released. This one marks a transition toward a more stylized and colorful visual style (which echoes a similar change in the game’s art direction as well). It was made possible by the ever-improving quality of guidance materials, models, and compositing techniques used in this workflow. Enjoy!
January 17 update: the newest episode is up, and this one pushes the envelope quite a bit. Much more elaborate guidance material has been used, and the degree of consistency between shots is on a whole new level. Just the planetarium sequence – which consists of 10 shots – used a composite of nearly 300 images to get the very specific detail and nuance described in the story.
December 6 update: we just released the next chapter of Chronicles.
In addition to the awesome narrative, it also advances the generative visual workflow even further, with several new techniques and a more impressionistic, watercolor-based rendering style.
This is the original episode that started it all:
Also, one of my favorite aspects of the process is the evolution of these techniques and the quality of the resulting output through the episodes, particularly with the character of Amarax the Lich.
The gradual increase in fidelity, as well as the consistency of detail we managed to achieve across different shots and angles is pretty cool:
