Behind the Slotlist: 12 Burning Baseballs Brings the Energy

Earlier that day, before our video call, Carl Wiggman, CEO of Print Studios was busy competing in a company tournament. 12 Burning Baseballs – this month’s addition to PokerStars Casino’s The Slotlist – was the game of choice for the morning.

Wiggman explains the ‘why’ behind this all-hands get-together.

“We sat together and played the game for half an hour and had a competition on it,” he states. “And yeah, of course it was fun and everything, but then we’re also going to find little things like that people react to that haven’t seen the game as much as us in the game dev team.”

Quality

With the game basically complete, this is taking quality assurance to another level, surely? Wiggman says he wouldn’t have it any other way. So, what might be discovered during such a company tournament for a new game, just weeks away from release?

“It might be something like, you know, how does this animation play out when this feature triggers? Is there something that sort of doesn’t come out fully or is it something that like doesn’t look quite as valuable as it’s supposed to look?”

He adds: “So, you find these events sometimes when you get deeper into the game that like this is actually a really hard condition to trigger. So it might be like a re-trigger that happens. Say the first re-trigger is super easy, but then the second re-trigger might be super difficult to get somehow. And then that second super re-trigger that needs to feel really, really awesome because you know after a while that it is like a really good thing. So, it’s just trying to find those things and making them even better.”

Initial idea for 12 Burning Baseballs

The initial idea for 12 Burning Baseballs is one which goes back a good few years, according to the Print Studio CEO. It was a personal playing experience which got Carl thinking.

“I was playing a game and one of the mechanics – at least it was when I was playing a game – gave me 160 spins. I was just like constantly re-triggering and re-triggering and re-triggering it. But they played out in normal pace, so it was a very slow process. And I realized that because I can no longer win the bonus because I’m in the bonus, I’m actually really bored watching this because I’m glad that I have the bonus, but you know, there’s nothing to chase for me, nothing for me to chase anymore.”

The spark for 12 Burning Baseballs had been lit.

“So, I wanted to take that experience and just kind of increase the intensity. So, in 12 Burning Baseballs, you have this sort of main mechanic just goes faster and faster and faster and faster and faster. Which just kind of ramps up the intensity to like almost breaking point levels where you eventually just kind of need to cave and just see the waves sort of come over you.”

That sense of increasing speed and the feeling of ratcheting intensity became the key point to what would become 12 Burning Baseballs.

“So, it came from that feeling of some bonuses just taking way too long and then when it was broached like maybe a year ago somebody said 12 Burning Baseballs just sounds really cool and I felt like there was just something to that. It was a bit we wanted to make something a little bit random, something that doesn’t have a classic fairy tale story or anything of like an archetypal story. Just kind of throwing into something more random which is something you can do I think with slots.”

Wiggman adds: “You don’t have to have characters and a story and an ending and all those things. You can just kind of see what happens when all the different random elements of a slot come together. And that’s kind of what we’ve been doing. So, we’ve been letting it come as we’re sort of developing it.”

Video Game Influence

According to Wiggman, Print Studios has a “a lot of video game enthusiasts” working for the company, and this is very much evident in the visual look of their games.

“Yeah, I mean we have often been compared to a studio or like we’ve also been called a studio that likes to bring in video game elements,” he admits, “and I think it is because we do have a lot of video game enthusiasts in the company. So that’s definitely close to heart and we don’t consider slots to be something that should be any different of an experience than a video game so to speak. It feels like sometimes people are like okay because it’s a slot we can take all these shortcuts in the production and whatnot, and we don’t consider that to be the case.”

He adds: “There’s also so many amazing mechanics from that world that you can bring into igaming, which is really important.”

Challenges

These initial stages were not without their challenges, admits Wiggman. The fact that there was just the mechanic and a title at this early point meant it was a tough place to start out from.

“So it was me, the artist and the animator and everybody just kind of sitting together and taking a look at the first couple of mood boards from the artist and then there were a lot of different themes and in the beginning, it was a little bit challenging.

“The artist was specifically like sort of saying you know ‘usually we have a story for our games and that you know that makes everything a bit easier’ and I was like ‘I know and I’m sorry about that we don’t have that this time we just have to try’ and that was a little bit painful at the moment but then once we kind of got over that hump that like ‘okay, there is no story’ then things started to flowing really creatively and then it started to build its own story. So yeah, it starts with like a wide array of mood boards looking at those then going for one theme and then just kind of taking it from black and white sketches to sort of rough colours. Then animators will come in and they will do a mood board of their different effects and then at the same time the mathematician will be doing math models as well and all of those will kind of try to sync together.”

More challenges followed quick enough. For Wiggman it was expected, but that didn’t make it any easier to find an ultimate solution.

“I mean we had to rewrite the whole spin engine because basically this very intense bonus feature it doesn’t no longer count the amount of spins you have. You don’t have like 10 spins. Instead, you have 10 seconds and then you can reset those seconds over and over, kind of like, you know, an arcade game where you’re going in a car and you need to reach the next checkpoint in order to reset your timer.

“So, it’s a bit of that feeling. But because we’re now based on seconds, there’s all kinds of technical challenges that that you have to overcome and we also have to get the feeling right and everything has to match sounds and animation. So, there was a bit of difficulty with that. We kind of knew that that would be difficult. But it was definitely the slowest part of the process trying to figure that out because it just takes a long time to sort of get those things right.”

The Slotlist

With the mere mention of ‘The Slotlist’, the Print Studio CEO’s eyes light up. He’s an advocate, or course, but he sees in The Slotlist a natural space for allowing unique games shine.

“I think it’s great. I mean, the moment that I heard about this initiative, I thought it was exactly the kind of thing that we wanted to push and help out and support in whatever way we can. I’ve been vocal before about how I feel that there’s a there’s a problem in slots that because we have so many games and because so many games that do the same thing as other games perform well, we kind of keep on putting those in front of the player and it results in the players just kind of being forced to sort of play the same old thing over and over and believing that that’s the only thing there is on offer.”
 
He continues: So I think you need to show a wide range of games and you need to let some games that are different, they need a little bit more push, they need a little bit more time in order for people to understand their sort of beauty and that way you’re going to just enjoy igaming much more in the long run, I think, because there’s a whole lot of intense experiences to be had out there, but they require that you don’t play the same mechanic over and over, even if it’s in different slots, different packages. So, yeah, I really like The Slotlist.”