Week One

My first day had some interesting events, right from when I arrived on site. The most noticeable one would be the construction going on in and around the building, creating an interesting environment with seemingly unstable floors and loud noises everywhere I looked. Nonetheless, work had to be done: after some quick introductions to everyone in the office, Brant discussed with Max and I what our main goals going forward would be. The overlaying concept would actually be more focused on online casinos rather than the traditional land based ones that we’re all used to. This is most comparable to those facebook games that you might have seen random friends sharing to try and get more credits. It turns out that the “Free to play” model of online games is very lucrative, luring people to spend money on the games through additional purchases to get more credits.

To get familiar with what we were working on, we were told to simply play some of the popular casino games on facebook for a few hours, taking note of what seemed to work well and what was not so enticing. I noted certain things like how often I won and how often I was offered to make some sort of purchase in the game. While playing games for hours might sound like a great job, these games really are not what I would call entertaining for me, and this makes sense when you look at the main demographic that primarily plays these kinds of games: women above the age of 40. Being an 18 year old male, I am far from qualified from being able to tell exactly what appeals to these ladies, but that was indeed my task.  Luckily, there are a lot of casino games that already exist, so there are plenty of examples to pull data from.

After hours of seemingly endless slots spins, we decided to move on to our next task. Now we were going to go into the programming of these games, with the intent of being able to program several games that would actually be playable in the future. Compared to the rather dull facebook games, the programming aspect was a much more difficult challenge, involving choosing a game, comparing it to another already programmed game with a similar style, and then using that game to program the new one. We’re planning on continuing this process for a few weeks, expanding to more advanced and complicated games as we gain more experience.