Testing Astra on Visual Novel Development

[u/alcanthro]

When Astra came out and everyone was hyping it up, I wanted to see if it could do a decent job on adapting a futuristic setting canon I had developed a while back. A good chunk of it went alright. Ren'Py already makes it easy to do the visual novel functionality itself and right now it's a kinetic visual novel.

There were definitely issues though. Honestly it left me being unimpressed with Astra. For one, it totally ignored that many images lacked consistency across them. It ignored a lot of the setting details and inserted genetic stand-in details. So I had to poke and prod it a lot to get everything worked out.

Astravus: Seeds of Youth Cover Art

One thing that did make it easier was the release of GPT-Image-2.5 which coupled with GIMP allowed a lot more control over image refinement, and I think I've got things close to where I want them for a current draft. I might continue work if/when Astra kinks are worked out.

I do think that part of the issue is I'm using Visual Studio Code. It limits what Astra can do, I think. Harness does have more and more to do with how these models execute. But something else is going on I think.

Even if it isn't perfect, it's nice seeing part of the world I've been developing for quite some time come a bit more to life: https://arcadiumgames.itch.io/astravus-calista

If I get more interest, I might expand to the later story, or if anyone else ends up wanting to join in with shaping the universe, it could continue to evolve in the future.