Devlog #2 – A Painted World
When I think back on the places that mattered to me, I don’t remember them the way a camera would. The details soften, shapes blur, and the colors shift into something warmer or colder than they actually were.
But the feeling of the place stays.
A station just after the last train departs. A quiet corner of a café where you waited for someone who never arrived. These memories aren’t always accurate, but they’re honest.
For our sample visual novel, we wanted the world to feel like that.
Uncertainty, Shape, and Color
As I mentioned in the last devlog, our story is guided by the Major Arcana. Each card defines the metaphorical place we inhabit for that chapter.
As the cards change, the world shifts with them. A new Arcana means a new metaphor. Because of that, the backgrounds couldn’t be strict, detailed illustrations. They needed to be softer. More expressive. A little unreal.
We went with painterly backgrounds—loose brushwork and bold color. It lets us focus on how the scene feels without being pinned down by perfect geometry.
In that sense, the backgrounds behave just like memories: uncertain in form, but certain in tone.
INT. and EXT.
In a screenplay, location changes are signaled by headings called sluglines. By convention these locations are always defined as happening inside, or outside (interior, or exterior). To support this, every Major Arcana location comes as a matched pair.
Scenes can happen anywhere, of course. But having both options allows us to establish the scene with an exterior shot, then cut to an interior one.
This is a classic filmmaking technique that helps the reader understand where a scene takes place, grounding them in the physical space. But this transition from exterior to interior can also be symbolic. It signifies crossing a threshold—moving from one context into another.
Public vs. Private Worlds
One interesting thing about memories is how people tend to blur into the scenery.
Sometimes I recall a place full of strangers—faces I never looked at, lives I passed by without noticing. Other times, the memory feels completely empty because I was too deep in the moment to notice anyone else.
To capture this, every background has a toggle:
- Public – A suggestion of crowds, soft silhouettes, vague figures.
- Private – An empty space, quiet and still.
It’s a small change, but it lets us adjust the intimacy of a scene with almost no effort.
Night and Day
We also created day and night variants for each background. Again, not to mimic real lighting, but to shape the tone.
- Day – Open, honest, vulnerable.
- Night – Introspective, fragile, secretive.
A street under a midday sun has a completely different weight than the same street under faint neon. By tweaking the light layers, we change the meaning of the setting without ever moving the camera.
Right-Side Up, Upside Down
In tarot, a card’s meaning changes depending on how you hold it. Drawn upright, it means one thing. Reversed, it means another.
We wanted the world to reflect that duality. The geometry stays the same. The place is still recognizable. But something is off. Maybe the light hits at an unsettling angle, or the shadows get heavier. The space feels tighter, lonelier, or unstable.
We handle these reversals through layers instead of brand new art. This allows us to preserve continuity, but twist the meaning just a little bit.
Color As Mood
We made a rule early on: each scene gets defined by a simple palette of three colors.
We aren't trying to match reality. We’re trying to capture an emotion.
A background might bathe the reader in warm pinks during a moment of closeness, or wash everything in deep blues during a moment of fear.
Here’s the cool part: this flexibility is possible because of how Inkweaver handles art.
The engine reads the artist’s layers exactly as they created them—blended, masked, tinted, and arranged with intention. We can manipulate light, shadow, and color shifts right in the engine, just like you would in Photoshop.
It means a single drawing can shift and breathe as the story demands.
A Palette for Creators
The goal here wasn't just to make a pretty visual novel. It was to build a toolkit.
Instead of staring at your assets and asking, “Which location fits this script?” we want you to ask:
“What should this moment feel like?”
The backgrounds answer that question because they’re not just places. They’re moods.
Closing Thoughts
It’s easy to think of a setting as something external—just a box for the characters to stand in. But in this story, the world is shaped by emotion as much as by light and color.
The places you see aren’t maps. They’re feelings.
They’re the way the MC remembers, or fears, or longs for certain moments. They are the shapes of thoughts he hasn’t fully understood yet.
In the next devlog, I want to talk about the only character that matters to our MC: the mysterious future-person. We'll dig into how we designed her expressions and poses to create a character who feels impossible to ignore.