This project is still in development. It’s a work in progress!

Introduction

Europa Universalis 4 is the first Paradox Interactive game I’ve played, and I fell in love with it. The depth of the mechanics and strategy made me feel like I was actually controlling a country in history. So it was natural to want to use my creative talents to mod the game. First I made Ages Reformed which overhauled the Ages and Splendor mechanics, adding new features and expanding the content. Second I made this, a complete reskin of the game’s UI.

Problem and Solution

There are numerous roadblocks baked into the game’s code that prevent UI designers from reskinning the game entirely. One of the primary impediments is the inability to change the scale of certain types of elements like checkbox buttons. That means, short of forcing the scale to work at 4k and only accommodating one screen size, the best solution is ultimately to make a low resolution element look as good as possible alongside high resolution elements. Another impediment is fixed window sizes for some elements, forcing contents to remain under a certain size. Another is the inability to move sub-windows to a different parent window, a real challenge for improving the UX in situations where I felt the position of a sub-window would be much better somewhere else. Despite these challenges, I did the best I could to improve the UX and the UI while striking a good balance between low resolution and high resolution elements.

Examples

Design Notes and AI

This mod would not be possible if it weren’t for AI, specifically Stable Diffusion. This is not a upscaling of the game’s UI. It’s a redraw. The basic workflow consisted of taking the game’s base UI and feeding it into Stable Diffusion’s Img2Img, running dozens of batches to get good results, and then using Photoshop to craft the final results. AI Could not create all of the graphics, but it did most of them. As AI is an emerging technology, only a few years old at the time of this writing, I’ve seen mixed opinions regarding it.

Here are my thoughts about it. I would not have taken the time to create all of these assets in my free time, without AI helping me. It was just too much work. For those who believe AI shouldn’t be used, but are also fans of EU4, you must ask, “What do I prefer, reskins of this caliber to exist, or AI not be used?” My answer is that I’d rather the project exist. The amount of time required to make this reskin without AI, is simply not possible to dedicate without compensation, as the demands of life are too much (for most people, lol).

Others view AI as replacing artists. I disagree. I think the best artists will make AI work for them. Others say AI diminishes the quality of the work, as if a work is not valuable unless a human spent countless hours on it. I agree that there is definitely something much more prestigious about a human accomplishing quality of this level without AI. But the finished product is still the finished product, and I’d rather it exist. Besides, I have invested countless hours into this.

AI could not produce these results on its own. Every element had to be carefully corrected and tailored to fit the visual needs of the game. That oversight required an artistic person such as myself to manage the whole operation and piece it together like one big puzzle. For example, frames around windows started as little pieces of gold frame that I put together, stretched, and blended. Icons started as individual images that were put together in composition, color corrected, and reformed with pieces removed or added manually as needed.

Numerous examples demonstrate that AI alone can’t produce game reskins. Humans alone can’t produce game reskins quickly. But together, development time for UI artists and designers can be drastically reduced, and the final quality significantly boosted!

To see development projects, check out Versatile Shipping, or Secure Contact Forms.

For gaming, check out Ant War or Ages Reformed.