‍About LBC Studios

LBC Studios, a Vancouver-based independent mobile gaming studio and publisher, was established in 2015 by Solon Bucholtz and Dennis Molloy, both originally from Langley, British Columbia. The abbreviation "LBC" hints at their roots.

Since its inception, LBC has expanded to include over 40 skilled team members, dedicated to developing four distinct mobile gaming titles. Guided by principles of accountability, growth, honesty, and passion, LBC persistently redefines the essence of a successful indie gaming studio, both locally and globally.

‍Creating Unique Characters & Environments for new IP

As the creators of Brewtopia, a chill world-building game with a ton of personality, LBC Studios always focused on keeping their art style unique and consistent. This approach stayed the same with development of their next big title - Shroomtopia. While creating a new IP is exciting, it presents a unique challenge: How to create compelling new characters and game worlds in the same signature style - while avoiding crunch? Instead of stretching their team thin, they turned to Layer again, using AI to speed up new production without losing their signature art style.

This time around, LBC expanded their use of the FLUX model to generate a mix of new characters, detailed environment assets, and stylized mushrooms - essential pieces for making Shroomtopia’s world feel alive. For characters, they trained a custom style based on their existing hand-drawn designs, letting them generate unique NPCs like Ada, a mushroom forager in a cool green dress, or Jasper, a free-spirited herbalist.

For the world itself, they built out forests, buildings, and foliage, using AI to generate trees and shrubs that blended seamlessly into their backgrounds. For the game’s mushroom-growing system, they transformed real-world fungi into stylized crops that fit perfectly into their farming mechanics.

In this case study, we’ll break down exactly how LBC Studios used Layer to create new characters, design rich environments, and generate stylized items - all while keeping full creative control and maintaining the handcrafted aesthetic that defines Shroomtopia.

Layer continues to impress with how accurately it captured our art style. Most AI tools struggle with the nuances, but Layer understood everything—from the flow of our lines to the subtle intricacies of our character proportions.
_{‍Michael Cheal, Art Lead, LBC Studios}

Stylized + Streamlined: How LBC Creates New Characters

Creating Shroomtopia’s roster meant creating more characters that felt like they truly belonged in the game’s world - hand-drawn, expressive, and full of personality. To keep things consistent, LBC Studios trained a custom FLUX model in Layer using their existing character art as a reference.

The process started with ChatGPT, which helped structure character descriptions and prompts in a way that worked well with Layer. For each new character concept, LBC would provide a rough idea - like “an elderly man radiating wisdom and warmth, with a straw hat perched on his silver hair and round glasses on his now” - and let ChatGPT translate that into a format that captured everything from facial expressions to outfit details.

From there, it was all about refinement. Characters like Ada, the mushroom forager in a flowing green dress, and Jasper, the older nature-lover carrying a prized mushroom, were polished further in Photoshop, tweaking details like clothing folds, color balance, and facial expressions to enhance their personality.

Layer generations helped get them 90% of the way there, but the final touch was all about fine-tuning and artistic direction, making sure each character felt handcrafted while keeping production efficient.

Map Elements: Populating Shroomtopia’s World

Building Shroomtopia’s world isn’t just about characters - it’s about the levels/environments that bring everything together. To create these, LBC turned to Layer’s FLUX model, training custom styles for map elements like trees, shrubs, and buildings.

Just like with characters, the process started with ChatGPT, which helped format descriptions for different environmental assets. LBC defined key elements - like tall pine trees with layered branches, dense shrubs with soft edges, and vibrant orange trees bursting with fruit - and let Layer generate variations in their Shroomtopia style. Each asset was created as a standalone piece, making it easy to mix and match elements to construct unique in-game environments.

Layer handled most of the heavy lifting, generating fully stylized trees, bushes, and decorative elements that fit seamlessly into Shroomtopia’s world. 

LBC then refined the best results in Photoshop, making small tweaks to shading, color saturation, and silhouette clarity to ensure each piece blended naturally into the game’s hand-drawn backgrounds. With this process, they were able to quickly populate their game with high-quality, style-consistent assets, giving their world a handcrafted feel without spending weeks on individual trees and plants.

The Magic of Shroomtopia’s Mushrooms

One of Shroomtopia’s core mechanics lets players cultivate different types of mushrooms, making them a key part of the game’s world. To expand this crop system, LBC needed a variety of mushrooms that felt botanically inspired but still fit within Shroomtopia’s stylized, hand-drawn aesthetic. Instead of illustrating each one from scratch, they used FLUX to generate mushrooms based on real-world references.

The process started with reference images - LBC selected photos of real mushrooms like Wavy Caps and Liberty Caps, known for their distinct shapes and textures. These images were compiled into a Photoshop file and run through their custom-trained FLUX model, which transformed them into Shroomtopia-style assets.

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Once they had a strong batch of generated mushrooms, the team fine-tuned the best results in Photoshop, adjusting colors, shading, and proportions to make them feel more vibrant and readable in-game. They also created multiple gameplay variations, tweaking shapes and sizes to suit different growth stages and UI displays.

Finally, everything was exported into Unity, where the mushrooms were integrated into the planter box system and game UI, giving players a diverse, visually engaging crop to cultivate.

By using Layer, LBC was able to rapidly expand their characters, backgrounds/levels, and in-game crop system without sacrificing style or quality.

What would’ve taken weeks to illustrate by hand was now a streamlined process, allowing them to focus more on gameplay design while still delivering beautifully crafted assets.

By handling more of the time-consuming aspects of our art pipeline, Layer has given me the freedom to focus on other important parts of development—innovation and creativity. It’s like having an extra set of hands that understands our vision perfectly.
_{‍Michael Cheal, Art Lead, LBC Studios}