I received an email from Panic this week informing me that Quest for the X has been selected for inclusion in the next Playdate Catalog. Whoohoo! I decided to update the cover and banner images for the game... which actually will more likely end up connected with the second chapter later. My friend and fellow artist Andrei Lapin is currently designing these for the first chapter.

I decided to cut some corners and use hotpot.ai to generate some images to start from.

My descriptions were something like "A historically-accurate knight templar, seen from behind, standing with a sword in a medieval French Chapel which is on fire." A number of the details were lost in the process of image generation, but it's not hard to imagine in the future that these might actually be included.

Here is what hotpot produced:

I went with the second one, and got to work using Sketches Pro on my iPad Pro to adjust the character of Guy de Canet, build out the background, and add the second character and some scrawled images on the back wall (no spoilers). 

Satisfied after about two hours, I did the final layouts in Adobe Illustrator, with a nod to the NES box art for Castlevania in one of them.

Not bad!

Although I'm an artist, designer, and a writer, I prefer to direct. Utilizing AI to render, or to code, or compose would allow me as a a creator to spend more time on conceptualising, without as much heavy lifting.

Staying optimistic about Skynet for now...