[0:00]This is my drawing skills. Yeah, I can't draw. But this is what I turned it into using this AI tool that I vibecoded in less than 24 hours. Like I made an entire manga in less than 24 hours. Look at it. It is called The In Between. There's character consistency, there's stylistic control, and I did it with this Vibecoded manga generator studio. Without a single line of code. You can create your characters. You can generate panels, even upload your own sketches, or entire pages. It is not perfect, okay? It's only V1, but oh my gosh, this unlocks so much. Either in just your normal workflow, or if you want to just build a SaaS product now without writing a single line of code. So in this video, let me show you the journey of how I did this in less than 24 hours.
[0:46]So I literally have no idea how to make manga. So in classic Tina Huang style, the first thing that I did was I took an entire course on how to make manga. I will be using Bolt.new. I'm using Bolt. I'm just going to write, build a web app with the following features. Click on the plan, use Sonnet and see what we can get from here. Let us see. Okay, a few plans, AI image generation, which AI image generation service would you prefer to use? I'm going to use Nano Banana because I do think it has the best character consistency. So, Nano Banana generate API key. Get API key. Got this marker called a Taro marker. Taro marker. Here's the API key. Yeah, let's go.
[1:48]No, an error. Rip. Okay, so we have the API key.
[1:56]I'm going to try it out. So we have the character, so bot has generated these three features. We have the character creator, where you can insert the character, describe the manga character and generate the character designs. You have the panel generator, where you can upload the character reference, description and also a sketch to generate the manga panels. Finally a page composer to compose all the different panels together. Now, let us see if it works. Fingers crossed. So character creator. Let's try something simple first. Woman in corporate wear. Creating characters. So, how's the front view and the back view? And here is the back view, and here is the front view. So it doesn't actually look like the same person here. So that's not good. This is like mostly a prompting thing though, so I'm just going to ask to change the the system prompt here. Okay. The front view and back view should be in one PNG and make sure that it only shows one front view and one back view with character consistency. Let us see, let us see. Let's try it. I'm going to do it. This is where we're doing manga. Let's just do like Japanese woman.
[3:06]Okay. That's actually not bad. I quite like that actually. Okay, I'm going to upload that reference image. Click to upload character sheet. And then I'm going to write panel description. Character presenting a report. I'm going to try that with just a description and then a sketch after. Let us see. Let us see. Yeah, no. What is this? No, definitely not. I'm going to take the image here, put it here, and be like, for the panel generator I used this reference image of the character sheet, panel description of character presenting a report, but the resulting panel does showcase what I put. Yeah, yeah, actually that worked. I do want to try it with a reference. Yeah. And another one that's like, here's a paper. Yeah.
[4:21]Okay, I'm going to send this over.
[4:27]It's a reference image. Character presenting some graphs with Please work. Do you guys like my drawing? Really trying my best here. That's actually not bad. Let's actually check the page composer now. I will just upload a few panels. Maybe I'll click these, and then see if it's able to put stuff together.
[4:56]Oh, this is not good. Okay, I need to do this. Take a screenshot. The dimensions of the page composer is not correct. Got to iron out these little details. Okay, that actually works fine. Then what if I describe it? The middle picture with major. Nice, I'm actually pretty impressed. Okay, I'm pretty happy with this. So we know that all these work now. So on the technical side, things are okay, so I feel a bit better. Great. Now let's actually work on the story itself. So when I was hiking, the story that kind of like popped into my head a lot is Through the Looking Glass. Not sure if you guys have read that story, or like watched the movie before. I believe that Through the Looking Glass, it's like a sequel to Alice in Wonderland. Actually, let me double check that. Okay, yeah, it actually says here. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland came first, and then Through the Looking Glass is the sequel. Okay, cool. So it was published six years later. This time Alice steps through a mirror into a world structured like a chess game, where everything is reversed or inverted. Yeah, so she goes in into this mirror world, and she starts off as a pawn, and everything is reversed, or inverted, but the ultimate goal is to reach the end and become a queen. Okay, so the most famous example is when Alice tries to reach the Red Queen in the garden. Alice walks directly toward her, but keeps finding herself back at the front door. Finally, she tries walking in the opposite direction, away from the Queen, and suddenly finds herself face-to-face with her. The Red Queen explains, now, here you see it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that. So it's like this inverted logic. Yeah, I really like that concept. So, yeah, that's sort of what I have in mind. I was also thinking about a lot of mangas and anime that are about having, like, is it called isekai? Um, you know, like they get transferred to a different universe, right? So it's sort of like that as well. And the main protagonist, I wanted to be someone who's like very serious, like very going through life. Everything is just like very straight-edged. Always getting all A's in school, doing all the correct things, and just finding themselves suddenly in this kind of situation where they have to navigate an entirely nonsensical way of life. And where they have to grow as a character to be able to embrace that type of uncertainty and then the crazy things that happen and just kind of succumbing to the will of the world. Okay, new chat. I'm writing the script for a manga that I'm going to eventually make. Right now I have a concept and conflict. I want to figure out more details to write a synopsis. Help me hash out the details and where I want to go with this. What I currently have: concept, something personal. A very uptight salarywoman who has done all the right things in life who somehow ends up in a nonsensical world where she is told that she must accomplish something but the rules don't make any sense. Along the way she meets lots of different people and scenarios that teach her to overcome her rigid worldview and learn to go with the flow and succumb to the will of the universe. Conflict with herself having to let go of her no-nonsense worldview in a nonsensical world to achieve her goal. I first want to figure out what the world concept. Let us see. Okay, option one, the upside down corporate tower. She ascends a skyscraper where she must ascend from the ground floor to the top floor. Is pretty cool. Okay, okay, we're getting somewhere. Working title, The Still Point. Ayaka is the perfect salarywoman, punctual, efficient, and devoted to doing everything right. She's climbed every rung exactly as she should, sacrificing spontaneity and joy for the security of following the rules. Her life is a meticulously planned equation where success is inevitable, as long as she never deviates. Then one day, she slips through a crack in reality and finds herself in an impossible world where logic doesn't exist. Staircases twist into nothing, clocks melt into rivers, gravity shifts without warning. Panicking, Ayaka watches as a massive floating pen appears in the sky and draws a glowing path before her. Relief floods through her, finally, structure, finally, rules. The pen draws an arrow pointing forward and she follows it gratefully. A trickster guide appears and explains, she must reach the Still Point, a place of perfect balance at the center of this chaos. The pen will help her get there. She just needs to follow its path. Ayaka looks for a shortcut. She's efficient after all. But the pen erases the ground everywhere except the queue entrance. Inside she meets the efficiency expert, a frantic creature who's been optimizing the queue for eternity. Ayaka tries to help him fix the system, but every logical solution creates more chaos. The pen keeps nudging her forward, refusing to let her solve it properly. Finally, in frustration, she just cuts the line, breaks the rules, and the domain dissolves. The pen draws a check mark, she passed. Domain two, the inverted office. The pen draws her into a corporate building, where up is down and meetings happen backwards. She meets the burnt-out manager, now blissfully incompetent after achieving enlightenment through failure. Ayaka is given a crisis to solve. Every corporate skill she uses makes it exponentially worse. And when she finally fails successfully by doing nothing at all, the domain dissolves. Ayaka, you're not helping me. You're torturing me with lessons I didn't ask for. The pen writes, you asked me to reach The Still Point. This is the way. Ayaka, your way, what about my way? The pen writes, show me. The garden of forgotten hobbies, domain three. The pen draws her into an overgrown landscape where abandoned dreams bloom as strange plants. Ayaka finds her own forgotten dreams here. Ayaka tries to revive them all. She can optimize her life to fit everything in. The pen erases her schedules, her plans. Ayaka, let me fix this. Let me do it right. The pen writes, you can't do everything. Ayaka, watch me. But the more she struggles, the more the garden overgrows, choking itself. When she finally releases them, the garden becomes beautiful. Ayaka is exhausted, resentful.
[11:48]Domain four, The Deadline Desert. The pen draws her into a vast empty space where time behaves unpredictably. She meets the timekeeper who forgot. Ayaka is given something urgent to deliver, but time speeds up and slows down randomly. Following the pen's guidance makes her miss every deadline. Ignoring it gets her stuck in time loops. She finally snaps. I'm done. I'm not playing your game anymore. She sits down in the sand, refuses to move. The pen hovers silently, the abandonment. Using Bolt's the Manga Generator Studio that we created, the app that we created, to start generating the characters there. So we can use them as reference photos. Ayaka, a perfectionist salarywoman in her late twenties to early thirties, always in business attire. The trickster, a small fox-like creature with a mischievous grin appears in puffs of smoke. The efficiency expert, a rabbit-like creature with wild eyes, multiple clipboards, frantic energy. The burnt-out manager, a dishevelled human man who lounges peacefully despite chaos. The collector of maybes, an ethereal plant-like creature who tends the garden of forgotten hobbies. The timekeeper who forgot, an ethereal being with clock hands for arms, face is serene. Okay, now let's do the pen, a ballpoint pen. I don't know if that would work because it's not like a people character. I don't know, let's see. Okay, yeah, I don't think that works because it's like a character sheet specifically. That's fair, I feel like, that's fair. Okay, so for the pen itself, I'm actually just going to use Gemini for this, for V1 of this app. So create image a ballpoint pen in manga black and white style. Cool. Wait, why does this have two clips? It should not have two clips. No, it still has two clips. That's weird. Why is this the hardest thing to generate? Like I feel like generating the characters was not even that hard, but generating like a ballpoint pen apparently is rocket science. Wow, that wasn't so hard, was it? Reference image done. Onwards. I'm going to try one. Let's try like a random panel. Wide shot of Tokyo office building at dusk. Lights glowing in windows. Okay, I'm going to do right to left. Wow. The floor tiles beneath her feet ripple. Okay, let's go with this for now. Oh my gosh. If this works, that will be very interesting. Oh, hey, not bad. Can we just give the AI some credit here? Generating panel. Okay, good. How would you rate my drawing from a scale of one to ten? Maybe minus three. You can't possibly be worse than my drawing. So I guess like, how many of you guys are equal to my inability to draw? Let me know. Let's prompt Bolt. I'm going to create a lazy mode, full page generator where you only have to put in a text prompt and it'll generate the entire page of manga for you. The panels are arranged to. Yeah, I wonder. Did I do it? Let's go here. We'll put this as the character sheet. Art style, this, and put the panels text. Fingers crossed, fingers crossed. This looks good. Okay, there's like some mixture between the Japanese and the English, but you know, actually I'm not even mad. Like this looks good. Yo. I'm thinking of how the fact I don't have to draw anymore. Oh my God. Let me try. Let me try the next page as well, tweaking a few things here and there, especially when there's multiple characters. The reference image that I attached did, but look. Oh my gosh. It actually worked with just text prompting. Okay, so overall this looked pretty good. But we have problems rendering the text itself. I don't think I can actually try to like prompt it better in order to make the situation better. Okay, I'm going to try this. I'm going to try to have it generate the bubbles, write a text bubbles, and then try to have it like text directly overlaid on it. I don't know if this is going to work.
[16:59]It did work. You can add the dialogue as like speech bubbles onto the manga pages. But it isn't the nicest user interface, like it takes a while for you to be able to adjust the dialogue box the way that you want it to.
[17:18]Also to be able to match the quality of the manga itself, I would need to be able to generate like different shapes, different styles, different fonts, which I'm pretty confident is doable, but for the V1 version, I just stuck it into Canva and you can do it so much faster. So here it is. Cue the montage. Tokyo at night. Here's the office building. Ayaka with her coffee cup going to refill her coffee. Suddenly, she goes a and gets spirited away into the In Between Land. Where am I? This can't be real. This is impossible. And while a shadow looms behind her. So scary. It's a giant floating pen, and she says, gosh ha. A pen. It is showing me the way out. Trickster appears. Welcome, lost one. Who are you? What is this place? You've slipped into the in between, a world where your rules don't apply. How do I get home? Simple, reach the Still Point, a place of perfect balance at the center of all this chaos. The pen will guide you there. Just follow its path. And then I can go home. Perhaps, perhaps not. Who knows? All right, I'm going to let you read the rest of the manga in peace without my narration. Link is in the description. Let me know what you think in the comments. This is my debut manga. All right, thank you so much for making it to the end of this video. That was my journey of making a manga and a manga generator app in less than 24 hours. Took me 17 hours and 32 minutes to be precise.
[19:35]This experience has taught me so much. It's also shown me like this wider trend of being able to improve your workflows by building your own apps, like vibecoding your own apps. And, you know, if it does well, you can literally like sell it as a SaaS product if you wish. I really think learning how to vibecode just like unlocks so much power. I have like so much to say about this topic and how like it fits into your work streams and the tips that I have. So maybe we're overdue for a new vibecoding video. Let me know in the comments if you would like me to make one. And in the meantime, I hope you're inspired to have a go at vibecoding yourself. Let me know in the comments the ideas that you want to build and I'll see you guys in the next video or live stream.
