Our work on Shadowveil: Legend of the Five Rings

In March 2025, our partners Palindrome Interactive and Amplifier Studios released Shadowveil: Legends of the Five Rings—a visually novel, feudal-Japan-inspired auto-battler.

The challenge

Our mission was to deliver the first-ever video game based on a 30-year-old fantasy franchise, Legend of the Five Rings (L5R). We had to do justice to a beloved universe with a dedicated fanbase—something we’d done before, but not with L5R.

Shadowveil’s painterly style demanded a fine touch across both engineering and creative tasks. We were to be a key part of Palindrome’s core team, working closely with them to take Shadowveil from a work in progress to something polished, intuitive, and technically flawless.

What we did

Our work spanned several parts of the game, from character concepting to Unreal Engine engineering.

Character Concept Art

Our character artwork consisted of realistic and stylized concepts. For realistic, we created around 20 ability cards, which were illustrations of either a character or a visualization of a character ability. In this case, the characters were provided by the partner, and some of the VFX abilities had already been developed by our team. The style and design of the cards were created by the partner, while we were responsible for the illustrations in their established style. We initially provided three to four sketches per card. Once a sketch was approved, we created the final color version.

As for stylized, our work went through many iterations as we fine-tuned designs according to Palindrome’s feedback, with whom we worked closely to achieve Shadowveil’s calligraphic visual style.

UI and UX

Palindrome fully entrusted us with Shadowveil’s UX, including technical and creative elements, from character screen and inventory to widget layouts and priority for interactions during the action phase. We analyzed the current state by playing the early game build—understanding the core gameplay loop, mechanics, and features—and then decomposed it to take full control of the game’s UX. This involved breaking the game down into features and screens, improving or even completely reworking initial drafts, and creating comprehensive documentation for all UX solutions.

VFX

We created many of Shadowveil’s visual effects, including visual design and technical implementation. The partner was particularly impressed with our visuals: we nailed the Art Director’s requests, helping them find a coherent style for the game that was in line with the desired visuals.

Unreal Engine engineering

We developed UI screens using Unreal UMG according to designs provided by Palindrome. It was important to the partner that we worked quickly and stayed faithful to their suggestions.

The outcome

Shadowveil: Legend of the Five Rings is a visually distinctive, challenging auto-battler experience, the first game of the L5R franchise, and we feel honored to have helped deliver it to the franchise’s community. We congratulate our partners Palindrome Interactive and Amplifier Studios on the game’s Steam release. Play Shadowveil now!