Storyline

Heavy and Demoman having a nice talk.
Heavy and Demoman after their argument.
Steve and the Knight having a picnic in the village.
Steve handing the Knight some bread.

Inspiration

One of our team members is a director, another has experience creating games. Preproduction for both takes a while so best way to cut down on that is to leverage AI. However, pulling images and animations from many different sources takes up a lot of time, so centralizing the generation and formatting of a storyboard is very efficient.

What it does

Storyline creates professional storyboards in minutes, not hours. Users input scene descriptions and our tool generates consistent visual frames, organizes them into a clear sequence, and formats everything into a clean, shareable storyboard. It's built specifically for game developers who need quick visual planning without the usual back-and-forth of hiring artists or spending hours sketching.

How we built it

We used Node.js for the frontend interface and integrated NanoBanana's/Gemini's image generation API for visual frames. The backend runs on Python allowing users to save projects to their computer. We spent a lot of time fine-tuning prompts to generate images that actually look like they belong in the same project, which was trickier than expected.

Challenges we ran into

API calls were our biggest headache. We had to carefully track how many tokens were used with each call and make sure we could generate every image without hitting corruption issues. We spent a lot of time optimizing our prompting and API calls to avoid getting rate-limited and wasting tokens. On top of that, our frontend was pretty volatile throughout development, which made testing and debugging much harder than it needed to be.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We actually built something that works and generates decent-looking storyboards! Our consistency algorithm improved a lot throughout the weekend, and we managed to create a clean, intuitive interface that doesn't feel overwhelming. We also made a launch video.

What we learned

AI image generation is powerful but needs a lot of hand-holding to be useful for creative work. We also learned that understanding your users' workflow is just as important as the tech itself. Creative professionals have very specific needs that aren't obvious until you dig into how they actually work.

What's next for Storyline

We want to add direct file importing from popular game engines so developers can pull in their existing assets seamlessly. We're also planning to create animations from still frames, letting users prototype movement and transitions right in the storyboard. Long term, we'd love to integrate with massive asset libraries for sound design, reference images, and other creative resources, making Storyline a one-stop shop for preproduction planning.