Behind the Scenes: Online Casino Gaming Software Development

According to Custom Market Insights, the global revenue of the online gambling market was valued at approximately USD 58.2 Billion in 2021 and is expected to reach a value of around USD 145.6 Billion by 2030,

The Baltic Times explains that such industry growth is led by:

• huge advancements in technology,
• a rise in middle class disposable income,
• lower transaction and operating costs than traditional gambling institutions,
• access to a much wider audience, and
• a richer variety of services.

These factors have accelerated online casino gaming development, and as a result, gaming software companies have become more and more competitive.

With the development process being as complicated and time-consuming as it is, creating a successful online casino game is no simple task.

Moreover, many challenges may pop up along the way. An expert from Playtech commented, “You always need to go through compliance and make sure that the user is not underaged and lives in a country where online casino games are not forbidden”.

This post aims to help casino games software developers improve their development process. It will cover:

• All stages of online casino game development
• Tools and techniques used to achieve better results at each stage

Brainstorming Ideas

To increase the likelihood of your game concept taking off, market research, analysis, and planning are required.

Based on thorough market research and analysis, you can then identify the type of casino game, theme, and its storyline.

An effective method of structuring your ideas is with a mind map. Create a central concept that will be a starting point in representing your topic of interest. Then, add branches, keywords, images, and comments. Such visualization will help capture your ideas and organize them properly.

In the brainstorming stage, make sure to investigate the technology trends that can help improve your future game.

For instance, you may want to examine virtual reality technology. VR games provide better bonus systems and improved in-game chatting options which may help your product become popular among a wider audience.

Another trend is cryptocurrency via blockchain services, a payment method that players and gaming software companies can both benefit from. Players can remain anonymous, carry out transactions faster, and pay minimum commission. Companies can increase their audience, skip a licensing stage, and pay no commission for multiple conversions.

Tools for Gambling Software Market Research

For more effective market research, apply the following tools:

1. Think with Google is a suite of online market research tools featuring reports and articles about consumer behavior trends, technological developments that might affect your business plan or marketing strategy, and marketing strategies insights.

A favorite feature, Find My Audience, provides information about consumers Google determines to be in the market for or interested in your products or services. As the most used search engine on the web, it’s a good place to start when looking for potential interest in your idea.

2. Loop11 is a usability testing system that enables you to test any website or an individual page — even your competitor’s. Based on the testing, this service creates heatmaps and provides clickstream analysis.

During beginning production phases, Loop11’s usability tests are used before launching the game, and then you can run those multiple times after it goes live.

3. Social Searcher is a social media search engine that helps you track what people say about your social game’s topic across the web’s social media environment and measures the results in real time. It covers such networks as Twitter, Google+, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit, Flickr, Dailymotion and Vimeo.

Social Searcher is used during the idea stage. The results shown by the system help understand whether the topic is popular among the gaming audience.

4. Newzoo allows you worldwide financial, economic, and statistical data in the games industry. The platform collects gambling data from publicly available sources and gathers it in a single place. It can help determine the casino game development cost, for example.

This tool can be useful during the market analysis stage once you have come up with the game topic and identified major competitors.

5. SurveyMonkey helps you to understand consumer and market preferences through in-depth surveys. The service allows for the creation of surveys both for primary and secondary market research and provides ready-made templates. It helps gain insights on your product, conduct market segmentation, and analyze consumer behavior.

SurveyMonkey is valuable during the idea stage. Additionally, it helps constantly monitor the nature of customers’ behavior after the game release.

Creating a Prototype

After conducting market research to support your idea, the creation of a prototype of the online social game takes place. The purpose of the online casino games development company is to build a skeletal structure, see how the game will look on paper, and design the primary version.

In his article on prototype creation, Todd Rivers, a technical artist and product designer at RDI Studio says that with a working prototype, it is easy to “feel” the game. He claims that a good prototype makes it possible to modify the look of the game quickly and “see if your first stab at the math is any good.”

Tools for Gambling Software Prototyping

The following tools will help casino software developers during the prototyping stage:

1. Framer is a prototyping tool that requires no coding knowledge. It enables you to develop and support UX flows, embed shapes, move images, incorporate text, gestures, and animation, and export the ready code.

2. Marvel facilitates mobile and web projects. It allows you to upload JPG, GIF, PSD images, or import them directly from Google Drive, Scratch, or Dropbox. Marvel provides editing options such as resizing, altering background colors, and it offers various prototype frames. There is also an option to optimize for different devices.

3. InVision is another web-based service for collaboratively creating interactive mockups both for mobile and web projects. It allows synchronizing Sketch and Photoshop files and creating hotspots, previewing and controlling versions, commenting, adding mobile gestures and unique animation, and creating hover states.

4. Proto.io is a web-based service for creating game interface prototypes for web and mobile projects. It targets game designers and UX professionals. The benefit of this tool is that it requires no coding and is available to everyone.

5. Figma is a collaborative web application for interface design, with additional offline features enabled by desktop applications for macOS and Windows. As a cloud-based design tool, Figma can be a powerful addition to enable team collaboration.

6. Unity is a complete platform for designing all sorts of casino games: mobile, social, instant, VR and AR, and others. Here at Innovecs, our designers and slot game developers use Unity Game Builder for mobile development, single/multiplayer games, intuitive UI, 2D, and 3D games, game character design, and further tech support and maintenance.

Coding

Coding is the most important stage of slot game development. During this stage, the team of software developers, designers, and artists work together to produce a single, well-functioning piece of gaming software. Compared to the stages described above, this one is the most time-consuming.

Tools for Online Gaming Software Coding

Usually, developers use casino game development services and technologies such as HTML5, JavaScript frameworks, Vert.x, and MongoDB. Let’s see how each of them helps:

1. 70% of all online slots developed are based on HTML5 since 97% of all active devices support this format. HTML5-based games are faster than instant ones. Moreover, vector graphics of SVG can be used for scalability without any changes in quality.

2. Angular is an open-source, cross-platform JS framework for building SPAs (single page applications). The benefits for online casino game development include 2-way data binding, dependency injection, directives, and simple testing capabilities. The code is easily readable, can be reusable, and there are no difficulties in maintaining it.

3. Node JS is an open-source, server-side JS RTE (run-time environment) that works on multiple platforms. It drives asynchronous input/output data with EDA (event-driven architecture). It best suits the lottery platform, betting software, and slot game development.

4. Vert.x is similar to Node.JS. Being multi-language, Vert.x can be applied by game development companies along with JavaScript, Ruby, Groovy, Java, or Python. It uses Hazelcast, which is the most scalable in-memory data grid system.

5. Vue JS is another JS framework with multi-ranked functions for the creation of high-end single page applications. It is also reliable for cross-platform development. Vue JS is a good choice for poker software developers.

6. MongoDB is a database that allows for accessing data directly from the front-end code, distributing it for applications, and triggering serverless functions to respond to data changes. It is used to collect and process records from online casino table games.

Testing

The final stage before releasing the game is testing to determine whether the application is ready to be launched. A critical eye is needed to find all inconsistencies and make sure the game is complete before production.

Tools for Effective Game Testing

The testing process is quite complicated. It consists of various techniques in connection with automation tools.

Here are a few types of online casino game testing:

1. Combinatorial testing entails the creation of many test cases that increase the efficiency of test execution, reduces cost, and provides better quality.

Key aspects:

• Test covers all possible value combinations of the parameters
• Parameters can be chosen from the game components, features, configs, character attributes, events, etc.
• Combinations for testing must be systematically generated

2. Functionality testing helps detect game inaccuracies or bugs that can influence user experience.

Key aspects:

• Confirmation that the game is developed in accordance with specifications.
• Assurance that the installation is seamless, the game properly operates in a minimized mode, payment gateways are well-supported, etc.
• Applies the black-box testing technique

3. Compatibility testing inspects whether the game works correctly in connection with hardware, software, and graphics configs of the device. It is often applied to mobile games to make sure they can be launched on different devices.

Key aspects:

• Checking whether the screen size matches all types of devices
• Ensuring the text in the interface is readable for all gamers
• Confirming general stability and workability of the gaming software

4. Regression testing is also called re-testing. Testers recheck the unchanged components of the software to make sure that the new modifications to other parts of the game have not affected the rest of its functionality.

Key aspects:

• Re-running tests used at the previous stages
• Comparing previous and current results of testing
• Catching bugs and errors before the game goes live

5. Load testing is used to see how the game will work under real-time loads. This method displays the response of the software when many users log on and play the game at the same time.

Key aspects:

• Checking product sustainability
• Determining whether the existing infrastructure suffices for seamless launch
• Identifying the number of users that can be supported

6. Play testing speaks for itself. Beta users and internal testers play the developed game to see how it works and examine non-functioning areas.

Key aspects:

• Assessing the game in general
• Checking whether it works in an organized manner
• Analyzing the first impressions of the users

Along with these testing types, our QA specialists use casino game development and testing studios such as JUnit, Cucumber, Selenium, Watir, WatiN, Capybara, Maven, Jenkins, and Bamboo to increase the effectiveness.

“Development process duration differs from game to game. While it takes just a few months to complete a simple yet addictive game, it might take up to 2 years and a much bigger team of people to soft-launch a huge project with various complex features,”
comments Alexey Isaev, VP Gaming and Entertainment Delivery at Innovecs Games.

Finale: Release of the Game

The game can only be released after it has undergone all the stages.

After release, projects require further support and maintenance as well as testing all fresh updates. Gaming software companies must continue researching and analyzing the market to retain users and create continued interest in the game.