Behind the Scenes

Hinterdom is an independent, one-person project. Crafted with care, in my home, just outside of Seattle.

I'm a user experience (UX) designer, visual designer, and illustrator. UX design, essentially designing apps, turns out to be a great fit for designing gaming mechanics. Visual design lends itself to beautiful books and websites. And my illustration background equipped me to understand and create the look + feel of Hinterdom.

I made deep use of AI tools during this process in order to both speed up the project and increase the final quality. Brainstorming, research, and game testing were greatly helped by this.

Lovingly illustrated by a creative, human artist using AI tools

I'm an artist and illustrator. While it's never been my main source of income, I have sold sold paintings and been paid for my illustrations, long before AI tools existed.

While creating Hintedrom I spent hundreds of hours generating thousands and thousands of versions of these images, re-arranging them in Photoshop for just the right pose or composition, researching reference images for color palettes and lighting. And it was absolutely done by hand, nudging with keyboard arrows, dragging with my mouse, using many the same neural pathways as sketching by pencil or creating vector illustrations from scratch.

No illustrators were harmed in the making of this game

I had zero budget for this project, working entirely with my own resources. I have a lot of empathy for the deep upheaval the professional illustration industry is facing with the rapid advancement of technology. I strongly believe in the longterm beauty of human creativity and desire, and trust that there will be many roles for illustrators using AI tools alongside illustrators using more traditional methods in our future.