‍About Gamegos

Gamegos started its journey in 2006 with the mission of providing fun and quality games for players worldwide. 

Upon achieving exceptional success with its social games, major Facebook hits such as Cafeland, Marketland and Fashland, Gamegos is now continuing its growth in the game industry with new mobile free-to-play games like Adventure Bay, Manor Cafe, and Cafeland - Restaurant Cooking.

Finding the unicorn - gen-AI made for game development

Like many modern game studios, Gamegos began exploring how AI could help with asset production. They needed the full package: a tool that was robust, fit into their existing workflows, and also wasn’t too difficult for the team to pick up. After testing options, Layer emerged as the top choice due to its professional focus and intuitive interface. What truly set Layer apart was the deep games industry expertise of its founders & staff -  resulting in a tool optimized for game artists. This cultural and professional connection instilled confidence in the partnership, reinforcing their decision to choose Layer for their studio.

Initially skeptical about the role AI could play in their creative process, the Gamegos team was quickly convinced of its value once they began using Layer. The tool proved instrumental in streamlining asset production, quickly generating and refining assets that aligned perfectly with Gamegos’s multiple game styles. The integration of Layer marked a significant shift in Gamegos's approach, allowing them to maintain their high artistic standards while accelerating production timelines.

Layer helped us with creative inspiration, offering new ideas and directions. As we used it more, we discovered it could also produce near game-ready assets. This convinced us to make AI a part of our pipeline.
_{‍Development Team , Gamegos}

Powering live-ops pipelines across multiple games

Gamegos started by  integrating Layer into the dev pipelines of their popular titles like Adventure Bay, Manor Cafe, and Cafeland - Restaurant Cooking. Leveraging Layer's artist-focused tools, the studio has enhanced its asset creation process, ensuring that every new visual stays true to their games' IP - while speeding up production like never before.

Marketing & Live-Ops assets

For marketing visuals and live-ops artwork, Gamegos used Layer’s built-in game styles to generate assets that aligned with their established IP. The team also used the Prompt Enhancer to further streamline this process, helping achieve the desired creative output with higher precision.

By creating variations and tweaking assets with custom styles, the team ensured consistency with everything from backgrounds to promotional objects. Additionally, Layer’s Canvas allowed the Gamegos team to fine-tune every detail of the generated assets, with the ability to export layered PSD files for final production.

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In-game promotions

For a studio like Gamegos, in-game promotions are critical for their live ops pipeline - driving players to specific content and generating revenue. However, as seen in the screens below, promo assets can be fairly complex from a design standpoint. When developing assets for in-game promotions, Gamegos relied on reference images and Layer’s built-in styles to generate promotional visuals that fit perfectly within the game’s aesthetic. The team then used the Canvas tool to build out specific elements of the promotion, including icons and UI elements. 

This workflow ensured that each promotional asset was not only visually appealing but also matched the game’s design language. The ability to create many variations of each asset gave the team a good amount of flexibility and the ability to test different visual styles before shipping to production.

Character creation & customization

For casual mobile games, having unique and engaging characters is essential. Character customization is a critical aspect of Gamegos's games, and key for player engagement. The team kicked things off by using Layer’s Starter Styles to create new outfits and accessories that matched their existing IP. 

They then further refined each character using the Canvas tools, which let them edit specific aspects of the asset without changing their overall appearance - perfect for changing a piece of clothing or hairstyle. By using layers within each asset, they could also seamlessly change the background behind each character without worrying about changing the character itself.

Asset export + refinement in Photoshop

While creating new game art  is undoubtedly important for every game studio, these assets need to fit into existing studio workflows to be valuable. One feature that sets Layer apart is the ability to easily export created assets directly into Photoshop via the PSD format. As the name implies, these exports also contain individual layers that let artists separate out elements like the character, backgrounds, and sections edited in the Canvas.

This proved instrumental for Gamegos, affording them the freedom to apply final touches in Photoshop, giving their art team the final control needed to bring assets into production. Illustrative examples below show side-by-side comparisons of artist-crafted characters and their AI-generated counterparts.

Gamegos x Layer into the future

What does the future hold for Gamegos and Layer? The team is planning to explore new use cases, such as style training with existing in-game characters to create marketing visuals. By using poses found through Poser or other character models, the team aims to generate new creative marketing images that work to bring new players into their games.

Additionally, Gamegos is considering doubling down on leveraging Layer to create more in-game inventory such as drop and merge item sets + variants that fit seamlessly within the game’s design. These use cases represent new ways to creatively leverage gen-AI in the studios production process going forward.

Layer has accelerated the progress of the sketch/painting that we created over a long period of time. It works for UI content as well, like simple backgrounds, icons and decorations. We can complete our work that used to take 3 days, in 1 day. It definitely helped us a lot with time and productivity.
_{‍Development Team , Gamegos}