Eighteen years on the page, one minute on screen

I finished the one-minute opening cinematic for Larithea this week. No dialogue, just music. It's the cold open that will play right after the tutorial — the piece that tells you who these people were before the game starts asking you to fight for them.

These characters aren't new. They first showed up in a fantasy novel I published in Ukraine in 2008 — *Серце гріє* (*The Heart Warms*), Гамазин press, four hundred pages. Same world, same magic schools, same wounded gods, same shape of the south. For eighteen years they only lived on the page. This week I got to watch them move.

Toolchain for the piece: Scenario for the animations, with custom-trained models per hero so faces stay consistent across shots. Suno for the music — built off the in-game theme, regenerated and re-cut until it carried the emotional arc. CapCut for the edit. Mastered 1:1, then exported a 9:16 cut for vertical feeds.

Inside the game itself this won't be a single video — it'll play as animated comic panels, same banner system the fight playout uses. The video version is a marketing cut; the in-game version is the canon delivery. Tomorrow's job is wiring it in after the tutorial scene.

This is the part of AI I keep coming back to as a solo dev. I'm not waiting on a studio, a publisher, or a 12-person art team to bring a story I've been carrying for years to a screen. The tools aren't perfect. The result wouldn't beat a funded production. But it exists, and 18 months ago it couldn't have. I still want a real artist on this game eventually. Until then, this is the bridge.