Post 4 of 8 in the game-factory series.
Icons are what people look at
You can theme fonts, colors, win messages, and sound effects. Change all of it and the game still reads like the original with a skin on it. Swap the icons — the actual symbols spinning in the reels — and it reads like a different game. The casino template I built by hand uses cloud service logos. Replace those with golden scarabs and ankhs and it becomes an Egyptian game. Keep the logos and give it an Egyptian color scheme and it doesn't.
A full theme has around thirty symbols. Each needs to be small enough to read at reel size, distinctive enough to tell apart mid-spin, and consistent enough that they look like they came from the same place. Getting that by hand for every theme is exactly what I wanted to avoid.
So two agents handle the visual layer: Image-Gen and Background-Gen. They're the shortest story in the pipeline — almost identical code, real results, and one failure mode I still haven't fully solved.
