While the author of BrowserQuests™ (Scott M. Huelsman) can do a lot of things well, developing custom fantasy artwork from scratch is not one of them. Fortunately, there are a variety of professional tools on the market for doing this, and the game's author would like to acknowledge these fantastic products!
Full AI-based Artwork Rebuild (2023)
Beginning in January of 2023 and released in early April, all the game's various depictions (heroes, characters, monsters, objects, effects, etc.) were all rebuilt using the AI (artificial intelligence) artwork generating capabilities provided by Midjourney. These images brought a level of beauty and consistency to the game's artwork and truly raised the bar regarding the game's playability.
Additionally, all the new area-based images depicting the party's current location within the game were generated by Midjourney as well, hundreds of spectacular images that really help make the game more fun and intriguing to play!
Character Portraits (pre 2023)
The game's original graphic portraits were developed within a nifty software package called the Epic Character Generator. Indeed, even with the upgrade to AI-generated art in early 2023, the original images generated by the Epic Character Generator were used as a source for the AI art.
As stated on the vendor's website, "With ePic Character Generator, creating professional-grade fantasy artwork has never been easier!" This was exactly why the tool was chosen to develop all the original character art for BrowserQuests,™ as the program is easy and intuitive to work with and the results are fantastic! Hundreds of high-quality images were generated by the tool in support of the RPG and we were quite happy with them.
Maps
While used sparingly within the game, fantasy map development requires a steep and artistic learning curve as well. Instead of trying to create nice-looking maps within a tool like Photoshop, Worldographer from Inkwell Ideas was chosen. This software tool also has a bit of a learning curve to it, but it's easier than producing maps in Photoshop (and resulting images are not directly copyrighted by the vendor, so they can be freely used within an online RPG like BrowserQuests.™)