About a year and a half ago, the idea for a game like Rise of Myths: Cthulhu came to mind. A bold roguelite deck-builder inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft. However, from the outset, we encountered what seemed to be an insurmountable barrier: the financial and time demands that such a project would entail given the resources we had used for Harakiri: Blades of Honor.
For Harakiri, we made a massive investment in artwork during over more than six years of continuous work. This involved hiring artists, reviewing their work, and adapting it to the game.
Given this prior experience, we estimated that replicating the same process for Rise of Myths would require an even greater financial investment in illustrations and a timeline of 3 to 5 years to create all the necessary artwork. Additionally, this process would need to be divided among several artists, which could lead to challenges with consistency and coherence in the art style.

With these considerations in mind, the Rise of Myths project of which we had already developed the core gameplay was shelved with little hope of it ever becoming a reality.

However, during the second half of 2023, there were significant advancements in tools incorporating so-called "AI." These developments extended beyond illustration creation (which often sparks debate) to areas like writing, editing, translation, and information gathering. As of today, we have no doubt that these tools are essential in the development processes of companies in this industry.
By late 2023, we reached out to specialists in image creation and editing through software. The challenge we presented them had three key objectives:
Reduce the cost and time needed to create the illustrations to make the project feasible for us as a publisher.
Launch the game with illustrations of the highest quality, comparable to those we achieved for Harakiri.
Leverage as much of the art library we compiled during the years of Harakiri's development as possible.
Fortunately, we were able to integrate a specialist into our team who assured us that the challenge was entirely achievable. After joining us in January this year, he began working on it.
Although illustration creation using software tools is usually done from scratch, for Rise of Myths we utilized a gallery containing not only the illustrations created during Harakiri's development, but also new ones specifically designed for training a Stable Diffusion image generation model. For example, the game's cover, which we've used as a reference for creating the character illustrations, was created from scratch by our collaborator Mich.

This process required hundreds of hours of fine-tuning and refining the model until it could produce illustrations we deemed suitable. Once generated, the illustrations based on the trained model were individually edited using tools like Photoshop and others.

That said, it's important to emphasize that the illustration creation process for Rise of Myths: Cthulhu was neither simple nor automated. Each piece has been meticulously edited in a process that took thousands of hours over more than 10 months of daily work by our team. The result is what you'll see as we reveal more illustrations.

Thanks to this process, Rise of Myths: Cthulhu is becoming a reality, something we thought impossible just over a year ago.