Layer Update (Jan ‘25) - New year, new tools, new you 🎉
A new year is always exciting, another chance to reinvent yourself (or your game). With AI models getting better than ever, we’re excited for another year of helping game developers create awesome player experiences. It’s a time of evolution and transition for the games industry, and we're here to help developers get through these challenges and bring their games to life.
To this end, a HUGE feature we released in January was video generation! We know from experience that video is always always a bottleneck for studios, in both core production and marketing/UA. With Layer you can now create trailers, game items, ads, social media assets, and more - all in the same platform you’ve been using.
Here's a great example of video in action from our LinkedIn.
Let us know what you think!
This is on top of some nice updates to our core 2D generation designed to improve the scale and speed of asset creation. We also added some solid updates to the Layer platform for Realtime, Prompting, and workspace management - it’s been a busy month!
Platform Updates ⚙️
Improvements and changes to the Layer platform.
New Features
- Video Generation has arrived! This is a big one, we’ve officially added video models into Layer. This means you can create 2D, 3D, and Video all in one workflow, pretty cool right? This will be key for creating everything from cinematic cutscenes and game items - to UA and marketing assets.
- Bigger and better 2D Batching. We know that generating large-scale batches of game assets is ideal when supporting a live game - giving you more options to move into production. To this end, we improved Layer’s ability to create multiple assets at once, now up to 16, with better speeds.
- Added support for batch size for generating more and less than four images at a time, allowing users to Forge up to 16 images at a time.
- Improved the speed of generations via parallelization, achieving way faster Forge speeds by 2-4x.
Platform Improvements
- Realtime live canvas. Added describe mode for Realtime canvas, and improved generation quality of Draw references.
- Prompting. Added support for random prompt generators + generating prompts based on the uploaded reference image. This should help with beefing up those smaller prompts and adding more detail to generations. We also added auto-enhancement and auto-translation options for prompts, which can be turned on & off as needed.
- Studio Workspaces. Improved file options across Forge Sessions, Drive, and History to offer a more uniform and consistent experience for File post-processing.
- App Health. Fixed a couple of long outstanding performance issues with Layer, and now the application should work way smoother than before.
The latest from #TeamLayer 📰
News, updates, and changes to the Layer team. Basically, everything that doesn’t involve lines of code.
Video Generation has arrived: Game trailers, items, ads, & more
We’re thrilled to announce that Video Generation is now live on Layer, giving game studios direct access to cutting-edge AI video models, all within the same creative platform.
Case Study: How LBC Studios created key assets for their new IP
LBC Studios started working on Shroomtopia, but wanted to keep a unique aesthetic across games. With assets already made from previous titles, they used custom styles + FLUX to quickly build out new characters, items, and levels.
Layer @ PGC London 2025
The Layer team attended PocketGamer.biz, leading the AI talk track & showcasing how gen-AI is being used today in studios around the world. No theory or fluff - just the real deal on how game teams can use this right now.
Layer AI's Joona Rahko on the power of AI in game development
Want to learn a bit from the person behind the code? This article from PocketGamer.biz features our very own Joona Rahko as he explores bringing gen-AI to gamedevs
Layer Co-founder Burcu Hakguder @ CES 2025
We discussed the future of AI in gaming, alongside industry veterans and innovators: Dean Takahashi, Emilee Helm, Haval Otherman, and Devin Reimer.
New #TeamLayer member: Shay Pomeroy
Shay is joining us as our Director of Marketing, handling all marketing and comms for Layer going forward. 2025 will be a big year for us, and building out an ambitious and performative marketing function will be key for growth.
Featured channel: LinkedIn
Looking for more professional-focused insights from Layer? Follow us on LinkedIn for the latest company insights, announcements, and news about our tools.
Looking Ahead 🔮
We’re super excited for 2025. Things are a bit crazy out there, but we’re heads down on building more tools that support game developers. We’re also expanding the Layer team to reach more developers and add more features across different asset types. Ultimately, we’re making development easier and more accessible, so you can bring your creations to life without worrying about the logistics as much.
As for what comes next, we’re adding a brand new refine tool which includes vectorization (.svg) support, upgrading our style trainer to reach the next level of consistency, this is alongside a fancy new filepicker that supports 2D, 3D, and Video references. We’re also exploring more batch operations, and workflow improvements so we can standardize how game studios are using our platform.
See you soon.
#TeamLayer
