Seren started life as a 3D RPG. That version had dungeons, combat mechanics, and all the scaffolding that comes with that genre. The more I worked on it, the more I felt I was building the wrong thing. The story I wanted to tell — something quiet and strange, rooted in Welsh folklore and the texture of grief — didn't need mechanics that encouraged action and combat. It needed space. It needed stillness.
So I changed the format.
Why Visual Novel
A visual novel is not a lesser form because of what it lacks. It removes the noise that would distract from what matters: the story, the characters, the world. Every frame is intentional. Every piece of music is chosen. The player cannot bulldoze their way through with stats — they have to be present, to read, to feel.
Seren is about a girl named Seren (the Welsh word for star) who is navigating loss and transition in a world that sits at the boundary between the known and the mythic. That story wants contemplation, not combat.
Welsh Folklore
The world of Seren draws on the Mabinogion — the collection of Welsh tales that is one of the oldest bodies of prose literature in Britain. The Mabinogion is full of threshold moments: people who pass between worlds, animals who are people, landscapes that are alive with meaning.
From the Mabinogion:
- Rhiannon — a figure of queenship, sorrow, and endurance, wrongly accused, whose story is about bearing injustice with dignity until the truth can be known
- Branwen — a story of displacement, of a woman used as a political object, of the long cost of violence on families and nations
- Pryderi — who is present in all four branches, a thread of continuity through transformation and loss
These stories are not costuming. They are structural. Seren's journey follows the shape of an initiatory descent — going into the dark, meeting what lives there, returning changed.
Alchemical Symbolism
The other major structural layer is alchemy — not the literal pursuit of gold, but alchemy understood as a symbolic map of transformation. The stages: nigredo (blackening, dissolution), albedo (whitening, purification), citrinitas (yellowing, the dawn), rubedo (reddening, completion). These describe a process of identity death and rebirth.
Seren moves through these stages. The game's colour palette and visual language shift with them. This is not explained to the player — it is there to be felt rather than decoded.
Art Pipeline with Meshy AI
One of the practical challenges of this project has been art assets. I am not a 2D illustrator in the conventional sense. I have been using Meshy AI to generate and refine character and environment art — starting from reference descriptions and iterating toward the specific visual language the game needs.
The combination of AI-assisted generation with intentional art direction is proving to be a workable pipeline. The key is specificity: vague prompts produce generic results. Detailed, emotionally-specific descriptions with clear stylistic references produce material that can be refined into something distinctive.
What's Next
The next phase is building the core narrative structure in Godot and completing the visual language of the first act — establishing the texture of Seren's world before she crosses the threshold into what comes after.
More to follow.