This post is a chronological tour of all the types of art assets in ChessCraft (images, sounds, music, voice) and how they were made.

A ton of different methods were used. There's 200+ chess pieces made by me in GIMP, the adventure map was hand drawn on paper then scanned, piano sounds by my cat, voices by my wife and I, and in the upcoming update 1.17 I had a ton of fun using GenAI to make a magic item system inspired by Diablo 2. Everything can be found in the ChessCraft Creative Commons project.

Quest (2005)

The year was 2005. The first iPhone hadn't come out yet. YouTube and Reddit were founded that year. Amazon was just an online bookstore. No Twitter yet.

In high school I took my first crack at making art for a hero and magic item system in the style of Diablo 2. Here's a sample of the 150 items:

If you squint, you can see some similarities to the newer GenAI art shown above.

Chess Piece Sprites (2018-2023)

The 200+ chess pieces were made mostly by me in GIMP and released under a creative commons license for anyone to use.

UI (2018+)

The origins of ChessCraft UI assets is hard to describe. Online free assets, tweaks, major edits, or I just made it completely from scratch. I'm never done and every new feature adds a few more.

Adventure Map (2018)

The adventure map in ChessCraft was hand drawn by me on paper and scanned as shown here. The many segments were assembled into giant maps in GIMP.

Cat Piano (2019-2020)

True story: my cat made the win and loss piano sounds. More than once as I'm playing piano she has jumped up, hit the record button, and mashed the keys. She's even in the credits.

Champion Voices (2026)

A champion might say I can't or I'll put that to good use when managing equipment items. My wife and I recorded our voices for the six champion types:

• Valkyrie
• Siren
• Paladin
• Highlander
• Algomancer
• Druid

For some like the Highlander, I first used GenAI to generate the spoken lines in a Scottish accent, then I recorded myself doing my best impression of it.

Item Sounds (2026)

I had a ton of fun finding quirky items in my home and clanking them against other quirky items to make the hundreds of item sounds. Fortunately I have a sword, shield, bo staff, and a leather bag and jacket. I then used GenAI to write an audio processing tool to make all their volumes consistent without clipping audio data. Tip: you should clang items far quieter than you might think for the best results.

Item Images (2024-2026)

With the upcoming 1.17 release I'm trying something new - using GenAI to help make the chess-themed art assets for a Diablo 2 (2000) style inventory and hero system.

ChessCraft is a passion project made by one person so this extensive magic item system was only possible with the help of GenAI. I love the results and had a ton of fun finally realizing my high school dream.

Items: Prompt

After a lot of iteration this is the kind of prompt that worked well for me. Often I tried to think of creative ways to also include a checkerboard pattern or chess iconography.

a sprite for an item in a game, transparent background, stylized, graphic design, minimalist, artistic, realistic, not pixelated, high resolution. tilted slightly facing bottom left. the item is a chest plate of boneweave armor, it looks like chain mail except made of finely woven bone. the shoulder pads are large bone fragments in an elegant and strong sculpture for armored shoulder pads and symmetrical. the whole armor has a very faint dark red tint and glow

Make the aspect ratio 3:4

For armor and outfits, I also made male and female variants with this prompt:

adjust this image so that the style and overall design are identical, exactly the same, except the form of the armor is better shaped for a feminine body, make the other gender sprite image for this image, transparent background

The GenAI did a great job but the color palettes slightly did not match. So GenAI wrote a script to take two images and rewrite the second so that its color palette more closely matches the first.

Items: Post-Processing

GenAI does 97% of the work but a lot still had to be done to make the items usable and visually consistent:

• iterating
• rotation
• resizing regions of some items
• ensuring a transparent background (sometimes the GenAI did not)
• erasing some portions of items, like female body armor with long trailing skirts
• thinner polearm shafts
• color and brightness adjustments
• manually ensuring bow strings and polearms are perfectly straight
• copying regions from some items onto others to hide GenAI curiosities
• reducing maximalist style flowing rolls of material in cloth
• warping, especially with armor and shields
• placing symmetrical duplicates with the same rotation style (glove and boots)
• a consistent artistic filter applied to all items (GIMP > filters > artistic > watercolors)

Items: Intellectual Property

The IP of GenAI has not been resolved by the courts yet. However I suspect my modifications would be considered non-trivial and I own the adaptation IP, which I release as usual in the ChessCraft Creative Commons project.

Champions

Painting in the style of John William Waterhouse, pre-raphaelite, simple painting, painting with brush strokes.

Dark fantasy, realistic, diablo 2, norse and viking themed. Transparent background. Only the portrait of the character.

Full body portrait showing head to feet, showing the entire person head to toe, of a pale older man with thinning long white hair, dressed as a norse demon trickster, wearing scaled chest armor colored in shades of dark red like a checkerboard. He wears a dark circlet with two small red demon horns, and a red demonhide belt. Faint makeup of a checkerboard on his face. In one hand he holds a large dark glass orb, in the other hand bleached white goat skull.

Clear silhouette of his body.

My Top Reasons for Using GenAI Art

1) Fun

If I'm being honest, my top reason is that I've had a lot of fun making GenAI art. Making ChessCraft since 2018 has been a marathon and I wanted to have fun with it again.

In 2022 (when this was not easy) I used my graphics card to make this image of myself as a viking:

Later I made a series of selfies I called Odd Companions. Here's one of my favorites:

2) Cost

So far there's 150+ items in ChessCraft and 7 champion portraits. Paying a higher quality artist to do all that (with a consistent style) would cost something like $10,000 or $20,000. Any less and the quality would be far below GenAI art.

3) Iterating

My first series of items were goofy. I think I had a hard time taking my item idea seriously until I saw it shaping up nicely. Here are some that didn't make the final cut:

Yep - that's a haunted sandwich.

Had I spent a lot of time or money making dozens of goofy assets, I would have had a hard time not including them in the final release of the game.

4) Contractors

Over the years I've hired several contractors including artists for other projects. I ended up not using what they made at all.

Conclusion

With the release of GenAI assets into the game I thought now was a good time to finally write down a chronology of all the different types of art assets in ChessCraft and their history. The first draft of this page was in a defensive tone, anticipating some backlash, but upon further reflection I think hardly anyone will notice or care.

I'm extremely pleased with the champion and item art and excited to soon release it! You can peruse the over-engineered magic item system in the Arboric Codex pages (once 1.17 is release).