Zoe Ebling seemingly has a straightforward job. As AGS Vice President of Interactive, she evaluates games to see which ones will resonate with the players.
But there’s nothing easy about what Ebling does.
“I wish it was simple and there was just one thing, because then my job would be really easy,” Ebling said during a CDC Roundtable on what slots games make it to market. “With AGS, we have so many different product lines that, depending on what vertical we’re in, whether it’s our three-reel stepper product or video or table games, the answer might change. We’re always looking for features that matter to players, new opportunities to try things which, in the online space, we have a lot more freedom to do. But we also do try to stay core to the mechanics that we know players love as well.”
What makes a game successful? First and foremost, it must be a slot game that draws and engages players. Stephanie Lau, Konami’s Vice President of Sales Enablement, Product Management, said new games must be creative but easily accessible.
“I know everyone wants innovative, but confident innovation or something that they know that has a chance of success,” Lau says. “They love it when we revolutionize the existing mechanic to something great or a known game to next level, whether it be sound, the graphics. There’s just so many different components that make games successful that (players) just go for it.”
Dan Whelan, Vice President of Gaming Product Development for Incredible Technologies, works from the design side of slot games. Incredible Technologies primarily deals with Class III games and notes that there’s geographic variation in terms of what slot players gravitate toward – to a point.
“If you make a great game, it’ll probably play, it’ll do well, I think, in Class III,” Whelan says. “To me, that’s our bread and butter. That’s where we make our most revenues. We focus on the best games we can there.
“And then after that, we take them and bring them to Class II, HHR (historical horse racing machines) and online.”
Ebling said because of the sheer expense of creating land-based games, it’s easier to try things with games designed for online. Because of the cost of online games is less expensive, “you can take bigger swings online,” she says.
There are also different ways you can translate and depict games online.
“I’m thinking of tables, for example, there’s limited things that you can do in casino with felt and where you can place things,” Ebling says. “When you look at a digital landscape, you can totally change the way that a player might engage with a game.”
Lau admits that oftentimes, an online game can serve as a springboard to placement in a brick-and-mortar setting.
“I definitely want to make sure what I can explore is testing some content online to see if it’s worth putting on to bricks-and-mortar,” she says, noting that if a game performs as bricks-and-mortar game, “you have high chance of success online.”
Sound also is an important design element when thinking about creating a game. Whelan says that Incredible Technologies tries to use sound as a way of signaling a win or jackpot.
One doesn’t even have to be looking at a game to recognize the sound of winning.
“Creating that experience is hard,” Whelan says, noting that games such as Buffalo Fallout, Dragon Link, or Fire Link Explosion have a sound that is immediately identifiable. “You’re like holy crap, someone is about to make some money, or at least be happy. Whether they win money or not, at least you gave them a few minutes of happiness.”
For online games, sound is important but harder to integrate. Ebling notes that brick-and-mortar games are massive computers with a lot of processing power and “a subwoofer in the base that’s blasting sound.”
But online games are designed to be accessed on laptops and home computers, and even mobile devices. Ebling said a lead game artist told her it took two weeks just for the assets to download on her computer, and then she had to pick through what to preserve to bring it to online “because can’t have as many animations.”
“I actually think if you play online, most games don’t have sound implemented,” Ebling said. “It’s typically the most common thing to break. I encourage you, if you’re in a state where there is online gambling, to actually figure out how many games have working sounds. There’s not a lot of them, because it’s a much more casual player.”
Ebling added sound is not as crucial for online games because a player might be sneaking a few spins at work or in a public space.
“I don’t think sound is as important for an online experience. I do still think you have people that like sounds … that element of being in the casino and hearing the sound, but I think it is different online because of why people are playing and how they’re playing as well.”
One of things Lau has to do is make sure a game is playable and understandable. She’s gone back to game designers and said that more instructions are needed.
“There’s nothing more frustrating when you’re playing a game and you don’t understand it,” Lau said. “We’ve been actually asking the developers can we have a screen that pops up, whether (players) read it the first time or not – they might read it the second time – to kind of explain those games, even on the button panel.”
But the most important element is one that a player never sees or considers: the math behind a game. Without good sound mathematical principles, a game is destined to fail.
“The math’s got to be good, because no matter how good the graphics or sounds are, you’re not going to get repeat play,” Whelan said. “With math, all the ingredients got to be right.”
“A lot of people will sit down and play games from art sound perspective,” Lau said. “But the math keeps you coming back to play, for that repeat business to keep (players) playing again and again. You can have the best art and sound in the world, but if you lose money, or you don’t feel like you had fun playing the game because the math model doesn’t suit what your expectations are and you don’t have those wins, you’re not going to come back.”
