Kugayama Shiori’s Death Diary (Kugayama Shiori no Shinizama Techou) by Laplacian is a mystery visual novel with a striking visual style. This was overseen by Pellet, the art director and lead illustrator on this title. Pellet has worked on quite a few Laplacian titles and has been with the developer since their earliest title, Kimi to Yumemishi.
Pellet has kindly agreed to an interview with NookGaming to share some of his thoughts about working on the title.
Can you tell us about your role at Laplacian and specifically as the Art Director & Lead Illustrator of Kugayama Shiori’s Death Diary?
I’m primarily responsible for character design, character sprites, and event CGs. I also oversaw the fine adjustments and tone consistency across all assets (including those I did not personally create) to ensure there are no discrepancies in the worldbuilding, maintaining a unified visual concept throughout the entire work.
Kugayama Shiori’s Death Diary carries a very striking visual tone. What were your primary inspirations when establishing the aesthetic for Shiori’s world?
This work is set in modern-day Japan, where the supernatural—such as ghosts and aberrations—intrudes into everyday life, so the core inspiration comes from Japanese ghost stories and urban legends. I aimed to blend the distinct atmosphere of traditional Japanese horror into contemporary settings. While some characters carry a more Western aesthetic, I believe that contrast is also part of the work’s chaotic charm.
The style feels like a significant departure from your previous work with Laplacian. Were there any particular challenges related to this?
Recently, Laplacian’s visual style leaned toward a delicate touch that evokes ephemerality, transparency, and beauty. For this project, however, we deliberately shifted that direction, challenging ourselves to create artwork with a more tactile sense of texture and weight, inspired by materials like washi paper and watercolor.
Achieving this new visual texture was not without its difficulties, but I feel that the end result captures a unique quality specific to this work—something gruesome and frightening, yet somehow comical—a visual style where a certain harshness coexists with a sense of playfulness.
Can you walk us through the design process for Shiori and how her look reflects the themes of the story?
The concept of this game’s main heroine, Kugayama Shiori, was established from the earliest stages of development–a fading ghost who casually kills herself again and again, whose sense of self reawakens when she meets the protagonist. From that, we chose the jellyfish as the core design motif.
Some species of jellyfish are known to rejuvenate when they reach the end of their lifespan, almost as if they repeatedly die and are reborn. I felt that the real-life phantom jellyfish was a perfect fit for her character.
If you take a closer look at the silhouette of her hairstyle, you’ll notice—it’s very much like a jellyfish.
Which character design was your favorite to create, and why?
My favorites are Shiori and Gyaruko. They were designed in the very early stages of development and ultimately defined the visual direction of the entire work, while also embodying many of the elements I personally like.
The two are deliberately designed in contrast with each other, with many elements placed in opposition—such as their main colors (blue and red), hairstyles (inward curls versus outward flips), clothing tones (muted versus bright white), and expressions (gentle versus sharp).
Kugayama Shiori’s Death Diary’s Steam page states that “Generative AI was used solely to assist with select background assets, exclusively through Adobe Firefly, a rights-cleared tool.” Some people in the English-speaking visual novel community are wary of generative AI in visual novels, due to concerns about both quality and ethics, even with a rights-cleared engine. What would you say to these people about the use of generative AI in Kugayama Shiori’s Death Diary? And can you tell us how this process fits into your artistic vision for the game world?
In this project, we used rights-cleared AI as a supplementary tool when converting location-scouted photographs into illustrated backgrounds. Specifically, we first generated a base image from the photographs using AI, and then made substantial manual corrections and paint-overs on top of it to create the final visuals.
The primary goal was to compensate for the limited manpower within our small team. We wanted to use AI to expand the number of backgrounds we could create, especially for a game with many locations like this one. However, in practice, we found that the overall production workload was not significantly different from drawing backgrounds entirely by hand, due to the heavy revisions we had to make. Based on this experience, we plan to carefully evaluate and refine our production workflow moving forward.
From a technical standpoint, what is your process for taking an AI-assisted background and adjusting it to ensure it feels like it belongs in the same hand-drawn world as your characters?
We treat the AI output as raw material or a base, and then aggressively repaint over it. By rendering over it with the same brushwork used for the characters, there are many cases where almost none of the original AI-generated base remains by the end.
This finishing process is a crucial step in ensuring that the characters and backgrounds are unified within the same visual world.
Now that the project is complete, what is the one specific detail in the game’s production that you are most proud of, but that players might not notice?
In previous Laplacian titles, the designs tended to emphasize a sense of stylish realism—something that could plausibly exist in the real world. For this project, however, we intentionally introduced more striking elements, such as bold inner hair colors, aiming for the kind of strong, iconic presence characteristic of game characters.
Because this created a noticeably different first impression compared to our past work, I was initially concerned about how fans would receive it. However, the response turned out to be very positive, and I’m relieved to feel that trusting my instincts was the right decision.
Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. Before we finish the interview, is there anything else you’d like to say to the English-speaking visual novel community regarding Kugayama Shiori’s Death Diary?
This work features a wide variety of choices and endings, including plenty of comedic scenes that might catch you off guard and make you laugh. Beyond just the enjoyment of reading a visual novel, I believe we’ve crafted an experience that is truly rewarding as a game in its own right.
I hope you’ll take the time to explore every nook and cranny, fully experiencing the story of Shiori and the rest of the ghostly cast.
Thank you to Pellet for talking with us on behalf of Laplacian and Robert Roy Dela Serna for arranging this interview and translating. Please check out their titles such as The Future Radio and the Artificial Pigeons and Cyanotype Daydream -The Girl Who Dreamed the World-,
You might also be interested in our Interview with Hayashi Ryousuke (Visual Novel Director).
Want to check out more visual novels? Why not check out our review of Welcome to Cafe Lumière! ~A Dragon Girl Concept Cafe~? We have also covered a wide variety of visual novels both original to English and localized from Japanese, which you can check out here.
A veteran of Oregon Trail and Battletoads, Wes has been playing and talking about games for as long as he can remember. He’s down to try almost anything, and he especially enjoys games with gripping narrative experiences.
