This project tests a working method for themed entertainment design: the idea and the key decisions come from the designer, while AI handles fast research and turns rough sketches into presentable visual drafts.

The brief was a single question. Given one hand sketch and thirty minutes, how far can an original event concept for an existing game travel, from first idea to a modular, buildable design language?

30

minutes, from sketch to design system

1

hand sketch as the source of truth

3

rounds of AI visual drafts

5

module families

OMORI is a psychological horror role-playing game by the independent studio OMOCAT. Funded on Kickstarter in 2014, it was released for PC in December 2020 and later on consoles. It has sold more than a million copies, holds a Metacritic score of 87, and is often compared to EarthBound and Yume Nikki.

The player follows Sunny, a reclusive teenager in his last days before moving away, and Omori, his alter ego in a dream world. The game moves between Headspace, a colorful dream of childhood friends and adventure, and Faraway Town, the real world, where the same friends have grown apart after a loss no one talks about.

2020

PC release; consoles in 2022

2

worlds: Headspace and Faraway Town

4

emotions that shape every battle

1M+

copies sold

Before any AI tool was opened, the work started with the game itself: playing it, mapping how it is built, and deciding what it is really about. This research became the standard every AI draft was later judged against.

Four lenses

Characters

The core feeling

After playing, the feeling that stayed was not fear but tenderness held inside avoidance. White Space is calm, blank and safe precisely because something is hidden outside it, and every bright room in Headspace is another way of not remembering. The game asks the player to keep walking through these comfortable spaces until, at the end of them, they find the person who was hiding there all along.

“Pass through one white space after another, and you will find me.”

From game to event

Each part of that feeling was translated into a physical element a visitor could walk through, touch or open.

The idea

The result was a single image, sketched by hand before any AI was involved: a black space filled with white boxes, one of them already unfolded.

OMORI moves between two kinds of space. White Space is the blank room where the player wakes, a place of refuge. Black Space holds what has been pushed down and forgotten.

The exhibition turns this into a stage. The hall is entirely black and filled with white boxes of different sizes. Each closed box is a sealed memory. Only one box has already unfolded: the white room where the game begins, with some of its walls lying flat and others half raised. Parts of the black floor lift up to become the garden scenery from the game.

Opening a box is the central gesture of the visit. It mirrors the game’s core act of remembering, and it gives visitors a reason to keep moving from one white space to the next.

The concept began as a single pencil sketch. It fixes the three elements every later version had to keep: the unfolded box at the center, the boxes of different sizes around it, and the garden flats in between.

The third round of AI drafts shows the full layout: the unfolded white room at the center, boxes at three scales around it, and garden flats in between.

The central box

The unfolded box recreates White Space, where the game begins. A lightbulb hangs on a long cord under the raised lid; in the game it is filled with darkness rather than light. A laptop, a sketchbook and Mewo the cat sit on the unfolded panels, and a standee of the boy marks where the player wakes. The white door to Headspace stands at the edge.

Three scales of box

The surrounding boxes are deliberately unequal in size, so each one asks for a different body posture and a different kind of discovery.

Suggested contents

Garden flats

Dashed outlines in the sketch mark garden scenery that visitors can pass through rather than walls. Flowers, trees and shrubs are built as separate flats and layered front to back to create depth between the boxes.

Research focused on how the game separates its worlds visually, so the boxes would not all collapse into one color scheme.

The findings were translated into three interchangeable “scene skins” that any box can wear.

The scheme was broken down into reusable modules so that boxes of any size can be built from one shared system.

Large rooms grow by adding standard wall panels. Small boxes keep their own shell size, but share patterns and props with the rest of the kit. The open side of a large box and the hand-lifted lid of a small box are designed separately, each for its own scale.

OMORI deals with grief, guilt, depression and suicide. The design includes content notices, spoiler-free paths and a quiet room as part of the visitor experience, not as an afterthought.

Iteration log

The experiment showed where AI is strongest: research and rapid visual iteration. It also showed where it is weakest: reading the intent of a rough sketch. The idea, and every correction, came from the designer.

Next steps are to define panel dimensions and connection details, test materials for the white shells and the black floor, plan visitor flow and capacity, and design an online companion in which boxes opened on site unlock their counterparts on the web.