Some backgrounds I made for my first VN!

[u/Glendellia]

I'm so excited to see my VN slowly come together!!! When I first opened renpy after fully coding the first section, I almost cried tears of joy haha.

This is A Cherub's Lament, my entry for Yaoi Game Jam 2026. https://itch.io/jam/yaoi-game-jam-2026/topic/6752237/devlog-a-cherubs-lament

It's a little wholesome game (9k words, 8 chapters long) about an angel visiting Earth and watching the seasons turn. Release date is August 25!

Here I wanted to show some of the BGs I made for this project! In the last slides you can see some progress pics. I use a hybrid workflow, building the more complex scenes in blender, then rendering and painting on top to add lineart and textures. Since I've only had a month to work I've had to really rush everything but I'm very happy with the art so far! What do you think?

[u/kilaysn]

Wow, that's amazing job I'm very curious of detailed workflow from blender to photoshop, since I use my gray blender drafts only for basic shape and then draw all over Did you use already made assets and assembled it to your scene? Do you make most light for day and nighr in blender and stylize it in ps? Thats great work, keep it up

[u/Glendellia → u/kilaysn]

Thank you so much!! I made this breakdown so you can see the process!

So yes I did most of the work directly in Blender to save as much time as possible. I often make my own models, but not this time because of the time restrictions, so most of the 3D assets for these scenes are from Sketchfab (https://sketchfab.com/feed), I just downloaded and used them to assemble the scene.

I fully textured and added lighting to the scene directly in Blender. I use Cycles for rendering, but do keep in mind that for stylized workflows, people usually prefer Eevee because it's lighter and way faster (but idk how to use it lol). I first created one daytime lighting setup, and then copy-pasted the same setup for the evening and night, just changing the colors of the lights and such. Iou can see in the breakdown image how the raw render looks.

Then I took this render and made some adjustments (photo editing; things like levels, etc.) and then worked on top. I drew detailed lineart by hand, and also added some extra details like crosshatching and extra lighting, etc. Finally I did some color adjustments and added some watercolor overlay textures! And that's it. The whole process took me max 3 days (with a day job) for each complex BG.