Finding a theme for a concept story

After doing a few studies for a couple of weeks I started noticing more and more how I was straying away from the study images and starting to paint my own thing. It got to a point where it was hardly worth calling it a study anymore because it wasn't matching the original images. I guess I was getting a little bored of just painting what I could see and just stepped away from that bit at a time. So this is how these two images came to be. Instead of painting another study I decided I would start painting images in the same theme that look as though they could be set in the same location and time. With my studies I noticed I had painted to 'old western' themed paintings and decided to carry that on with this.
I like the idea of a game that's set in the wild west as I don't believe it's been overly done like most themes such as scifi and dragons and knights. Apart from Red dead redemption I can't think of another popular western styled game. When Hannah Spikings came to visit I asked her what would be in the ideal portfolio in her opinion and one of the things she said that she'd hope to see something that she hasn't seen before unlike the popular theme of scifi and soldiers. This is what lead me to focus these two pieces on a western style as it's something I don't really see on art websites such as Artstation.

Over the summer I created these three images that were all linked to each other.

I want to do the same thing but with more images to see if it's more effective in story telling or portraying a characters story/ personality. I don't want to create a story board but more of a loose idea that can be interpenetrated differently depending on the viewer. I think it's the job of the concept artist to help people start generating multiple possibilities and ideas for a game and not telling a story set in stone through their work. So my main goal will to be to paint images that are clearly all linked through location and time and to have designs and characters in them that all fit in with the theme.
I have loose story ideas in my head when painting these pieces but I'll need to be careful to not make it overly obvious so that the story behind the images can still be perceived differently.

With the latest two Images I've painted this week (the two western ones at the top) I can see a big difference in my work. After spending two weeks on study images and practising colour and brush strokes I've managed to take it across into my concepts a lot more easily than expected. I was focusing on painting two images that aren't sunny and bright to helps with the mood and atmosphere that I have in mind for this theoretical game. Normally in my past paintings that would mean my colours suffer and the whole image would be dull. I think I managed to find a good balance between the two as I know I couldn't make it too bright or dark and that I would have to meet in the middle somewhere. Before painting the piece with the fire I decided to do some research. Hannah Spikings had mentioned that there are a fair few people who really like historically accurate designs/paintings in the industry so before starting that piece I researched oil mining and how it developed and what the structures looked like. I thought this would be good practice if I'm potentially commissioned to paint a piece that has to be accurate to a certain time or theme.