‍About Fortune Mine Games

The Fortune Mine (FM) team is a dynamic blend of exceptional individuals, handpicked from the finest engineering and art colleges. 

At its core, Fortune Mine embodies a culture of conscientiousness and self-discipline, underpinned by a rich diversity of knowledge and profound expertise in application management. The team's co-founders, distinguished leaders in both computer and industrial engineering, bring a wealth of experience in management, technology, growth, and product development.

The team is a cohesive, agile collective, driven by a common goal: to make an exceptional casual game destined to entertain players for years to come.

Creating a recipe for innovation

Coin Chef (IOS, Android) is a social luck battle game where players build colorful restaurants by winning coins and engaging with other players in live events. Designed to be an accessible game for all types of players, Coin Chef requires a strong pipeline of high-quality assets, especially around level design. This ranged from content such as slot machines, upgrades, and items to full levels and backgrounds. Level production especially was mission critical, as engaged players frequently demanded new content.

The challenge: How to create enough content to meet player demands in a reasonable timeframe?

The Fortune Mine team typically produces 2D, isometric art assets with a production process that includes sketching, draft coloring, and final coloring. Each level consists of 20 item upgrades in total, which led to long production times. The team needed a way to quickly scale up and reduce production time.

Always open to innovation, the Fortune Mine team initially turned to Layer’s gen-AI tools to accelerate the process around sketching and drafting. This quickly led to a huge reduction in production times, while maintaining the same high level of quality.
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Meeting player’s appetite for more content

Once the Fortune Mine team adopted Layer, the impact of production timelines became quickly apparent. The team took a broad approach to adoption, leveraging custom style training, in-canvas editing, and Photoshop (PSD) exports to build out new AI-powered workflows. 

Much of the initial work was focused on building out new environments for Coin Chef, giving artists more power to concept new ideas. The end assets produced include slot machines, core and meta backgrounds, 4 items with 4 upgrades, and environmental assets.

Thanks to Layer AI, production times of level assets including organic and inorganic characters and animals, environment and slot designs have become 4 times faster while maintaining high quality.
‍Production Team, Fortune Mine Games

Background assets for mini-games

The Fortune Mine team kicked off production with detailed backgrounds for mini-games. These are key for keeping players engaged in Coin Chef and act as a way to add variety to the core game loop. Captions were auto-generated by Layer’s auto-captioning feature then edited by the Fortune Mine team to build out a wide range of options.

Final assets were then exported directly from Layer into Photoshop for final touch ups before being deployed live in-game.

Example prompt:

A forest resembling rainforests with tall trees, a ground covered in soil and stone details. In the background, we see a lake through the lush vegetation, reminiscent of the green jungles seen in movies like ‘The Jungle Book.’ The scene also features remnants of Aztec architecture and archaeological ruins,[blur,poorly drawn, out of frame, vibrant color,],(clear, net, focus)

‍Layer became so core that if there is an issue, production stops.
_{‍Production Team, Fortune Mine Games}

Example environment concepts + prompts:

Example environment final outputs:

Example environment final outputs:

Slot-style level design

While artistic backgrounds are important, one critical feature that made Layer particularly appealing was the ability to create assets with layered transparency. This was critical for importing into the game, where assets needed to fit perfectly around Coin Chef’s existing mechanics. Once variations were generated inside Layer, they could be easily brought into Photoshop and added to game wireframes for integration.

Example prompt:

A two-story slot machine inspired by a jazz club building, predominantly adorned with red and yellow colors, featuring a trumpet on the left and a basketball on the right, digital painting, hand-painted, vibrant colors, africa, sharpness, mobile game art

Layer really accelerated the process, especially for sketching and draft coloring phases. We finalize the outputs on Photoshop to have even more clean visuals. PSD export features have been a fantastic improvement to our workflow.
_{‍Production Team, Fortune Mine Games}

Example style inputs:

Example outputs:

Finalized output in Photoshop after exporting as PSD in Layer:

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Food for thought

• Training multiple styles in Layer per game was key in achieving the initial consistency the Fortune Mine team has been looking for. Learn how to create styles
• Fortune Mine used Layer AI for both concepts and production assets and exported to PSD for finer edits on Photoshop.
• There is an initial learning curve with Layer due to the depth of features. Once onboarded, the team was able to create professional assets much faster than usual. The Fortune Mine team in particular is confident they will be able to shorten the time required to make levels even further from 5-7 days to 3-5 days thanks to Layer’s upcoming features. ​