How Does Casino Game Development Work?

Going by the latest sector count, the interactive gaming sphere is home to more than twenty-five hundred online casino games for real money. That is a staggering number, and it is even more impressive when one discovers that this figure was five thousand titles lower in 2020 than it is today. So, the pace with which products in this industry get churned out has become unbelievably swift. That is primarily due to the ever-increasing number of providers and operators popping up and flocking to this business arena.

Nowadays, it is not unusual for a provider of slots and table games to manufacture six or more such products monthly. Malta-based Pragmatic Play has maintained such a schedule for the past couple of years, saturating online casinos with its products. The same can get said for multiple companies operating in the offshore market, bitcoin casinos, and fiat currency online casino USA sites based abroad.

Hence, today, casino players have access to loads of gaming diversity. Betting variety is also on hand for users of online sportsbooks, who can now bet on real-world sporting events at betting sites remotely and gamble on outcomes of virtual ones and eSports contests. Most utilize a betting strategy when doing so.

Keeping on topic, the purpose of this article is to detail how a casino game gets created. Explaining, in short, who is responsible for what during the process and how these products are evolving, moving the industry forward to cater to new demographics.

What Is a Casino Game?

Ancient Egypt is probably the most popular online slot theme ever.

Before diving deep into the planning and software creation of real money casino games, let us define what gaming products are exactly. They are games of chance where the outcome generation process is random. However, every casino game out there features a mathematical advantage that favors its operator. That is so because gambling companies are in business to make a profit, and the only way to ensure that they do is to host gaming options where the odds get tilted in their favor. An example of this principle is blackjack, which has a house edge of 2%.

Brainstorming

Naturally, ahead of rolling up their sleeves and writing code, gambling software developers must figure out what they will be making. The online gambling landscape has gambling games that utilize virtually every theme possible. For example, there are around hundred and fifty slots featuring Buffalos and two hundred with Cleopatra as a title character. So, while the choices are endless, there are several reoccurring themes that developers lean on and are prevalent in casino lobbies. Popular ones include Ancient Egypt, magic, South American civilizations, and their hidden treasure-filled cities.

Strategies that developers use to generate ideas for new releases predominantly are market research, concept sprints, combining elements from previous titles, and looking for novel twists to classic games. Of course, during the brainstorming process, not only do the theme and its visual presentation get discussed, but gameplay mechanics and specs like max exposure and RTP. Once the team settles on all these, they can move on to designing the game.

Designing the Game

The design process is different depending on each studio’s established practices. Concerning casino product creation, there are no staple software products that everyone uses. Every company goes about making mockups and wireframes for initial designs differently.

Usually, the graphic design team’s illustrators try to capture the aimed feel with rudimentary drawings, fashioning art whose goal is to inspire new ideas. Wireframes demonstrate a structure on how a player will advance throughout the gameplay. They inform everyone on how gamblers can attain entry into bonus rounds and what the purposes these modes have en route to someone claiming the title’s max prize.

A table detailing the minimum and maximum bet limits, the volatility of the planned product, and other essential game characteristics are also a must. Polling for these can inform other aspects of the gambling experience, predicting the optimal deposit size for players to get satisfactory enjoyment from the release.

It is vital to note that sketches and game art produced in this stage are not final. They are a step that helps the team envision the end appearance of the game.

Computer & Software Development

In 2015, the online gambling sector began phasing out Flash, and entirely switching over to HTML5.

A crucial component of any casino game is the math model it implements. That holds true for online ones accepting payment methods like various fiat and digital currency money forms and land-based machines. The behavior of these products gets chiefly governed by algorithms called random number generators. They continuously manufacture random figures that determine game outcomes. In online and Las Vegas slots, the number produced by this software is responsible for a specific symbol combo getting formed on a reel-spinners grid. No one can predict what number these algorithms can churn out.

In many cases, developers use RNGs from past games. For some, they tweak these to produce winning combos at a slightly altered rate. It is important to say that these math models are the heart and soul of every software casino game, and companies often outsource their build or they purchase premade ones.

Aside from the back end of a gambling game, for its UX/UI design, programmers and designers use programs like Figma and Adobe XD. Often, a developer will implement the same button configuration for all their releases for years before changing it. That is an industry-wide practice. Therefore, few companies waste time in this step. Instead, they opt to implement their game-ready interface solution. The same applies to the game mechanisms they put in their products. One can say that the backend for most online slots is largely a compilation process. The exceptions are releases providers hope will make significant splashes in the sector. They waste more time on those.

Testing

Testing, also called quality assurance, is something that all pieces of software go through before becoming available to the masses. It involves a group of in-house or freelance QA experts going through the code quality and examining the title’s load speeds, playability, bonus feature payouts, and more.

The goal here is to track down bugs and game weaknesses that can hamper a player’s gaming experience and fix them before the game gets presented to the public.

Common issues captured during this step are modes not triggering, screens freezing, and the game crashing at various intervals. The latter can get caused by in-game activity or can happen at random.

Pragmatic Play is an example of a provider that distributes its games, and those of other partnered studios.

Distribution to Online & Land-Based Casinos

Every game’s release gets preceded by a press release sent out to top gambling news outlets, who post it to provide content to their readers, informing them of industry goings-on and indirectly promoting the title in question.

When it comes to online gambling products, the provider, if prestigious enough, could have a distribution network that delivers its creations to various operators who put them up on their casino sites. The discussed Pragmatic Play is one such entity. That said, this provider also works with smaller studios. And it distributes their releases under its umbrella. Microgaming does the same. That means that sometimes when a platform lists a game as one from one provider, that company did not necessarily created it. It merely may have only distributed it.

In the land-based sector, things work similarly. Some high-end staple brands like IGT (International Game Technologies) distributed their Las Vegas games to Sin City venues and throughout the US. Lower-end companies use third-party distributors and vendors. The Star Gaming Corporation is one such organization.