How To Make Your Own Visual Novel with AI (Part 3: Visuals)

If you’re here, you probably had the same idea as me — and a few others — you’ve come up with this clever idea to make a visual novel with the help of AI tools. This is part 3, where I walk through how to generate backgrounds, cutscenes, character sprites, and logo/ui elements for the game.

The title screen for the game I made

If you are looking for part 2, please refer here.

Scene backgrounds

The first thing I wanted to get out of the way was generating scene backgrounds. This was simple enough; I simply asked for a Midjourney prompt to be generated:

“Can you come up with a visual description of the setting for scene 1? It should be written in the style of a Midjourney prompt. Ensure that there are no people or text present in this background image that I will generate.”

Style consistency in scene backgrounds

Although I did expect some level of stylistic consistency, backgrounds in visual novels tend to be an afterthought, and I noticed it wasn’t uncommon for other indie developers to simply use stock photographs or buy generic art for use in their games.

Therefore, I was more lax with my approach, and simply relied on Midjourney’s personalization and style reference parameters to maintain…