“We simply view ourselves as purveyors of playful ideas for the casino curious”

If you’ve already checked out Aeterna, Three Blind Mice, and several other great games from Black Pudding Games, you’d see where our itch to meet the team of creators is coming from. Their content is fresh, fun, and unique. So, we reached out to the studio hoping they would entertain our curiosity and share some inside scoop on their creation process, thoughts about the modern gaming industry, and growing business in these turbulent times. Without further ado, here is the ultimate must-read if you are into a new approach to manufacturing slots as much as we are. 

We are excited to get acquainted with the team of Black Pudding Games. Please tell us more about the key members and the idea that led you to start a new game-developing studio in an extremely competitive segment of iGaming.

The key members of the team are Luke Taylor, Nathan Howes, and Dan Nyman who, between them, have clocked up over three decades in the iGaming industry and bring combined talents of online marketing, graphics, sound design, mathematics and being peculiar to the Pudding party. They also have the benefit of the febrile imagination of Dr Fintan Coyle – the co-creator of the legendary TV gameshow, The Weakest Link – as a regular collaborator to help cook up interesting ways or warping wagering machines into something new.

The idea around which the company coalesced was what became our recent release, Aeterna. On a fateful day back in the autumn of 2018, Dan found himself around Fintan’s kitchen table in London, staring at bits of cardboard Fintan had cut out and stuck together with Sellotape. This lo-fi, tabletop prototyping (after a few lunchtime pints) was the genesis of the reel array that ignited the Orbital Reactor™ slot format that powers Aeterna. It was the perfect debut to demonstrate Black Pudding’s commitment to actually ‘doing different’ to entertain players and catch the attention of industry professionals that share our ambition to find tomorrow’s breakout hits.

It has been almost a year since the team inked a partnership deal with 1x2 Gaming. How has this year of collaborating turned out for you?

It’s been a very pleasurable experience for us. The 1x2 team are excellent people to be working with. They are professional, personable and have a fantastic pedigree in the industry. Kevin Reid and Sean St John (1x2’s CCO and CEO respectively) were quick to see the potential of the Pudding’s ideas when we informally debuted prototypes to them at ICE 2018, and the partnership has provided the essential, global platform and distribution expertise we needed for a robust route to market and credibility with big-name operators. We must also praise their patience in dealing with our excitable behaviour – their wisdom and knowledge of boxing clever in the industry has been much appreciated.

Would you say that 2020 with all its challenges slowed down the growth and development of the iGaming industry, or allowed it to pivot in a new direction? Has it affected the studio’s growth in any way?

To be honest, we feel it’s too early to say with any certainty what direct causal effects the extraordinary global events of 2020 have had on iGaming. We imagine things are still shaking down, plus the long tail of the COVID-19 pandemic is unknowable at the time we’re writing this. The only opinion we would venture is that, anecdotally, we understand the interest in e-sports and virtual sports wagering bloomed when traditional live sports were curtailed for public health reasons earlier this year. 

With respect to Black Pudding’s plans this year, the only discernible impact was the slight delay in getting games through certification for release. We’re looking to grow our business in a pragmatic way, releasing with the ethos of quality over quantity in mind, so hadn’t set any rigid targets for this year that could have been wrecked by the events that have marred things for so many people this year.

We’re looking to grow our business in a pragmatic way, releasing with the ethos of quality over quantity in mind.

What’s the team’s take on how a slot should look visually and what are the key ingredients that you believe to be the main ones to a slot becoming a hit?

First, we follow the principle that an online slot has got to look sharp in portrait presentation on mobile devices. Increasingly this is the de facto way players want to enjoy their games, so if the format looks out of place in portrait and is hopeless for one-handed play it should get back in the sea! Secondly, we reckon a 21st Century slot should not only look funky but also avoid clichéd themes – or at least subvert them – to amuse players who are a bit bored of seeing games garnished with wolves, Ptolemaic queens, and ginger Irish pixies smoking clay pipes.

With respect to the key ingredients we believe need to be addressed in aiming for a hit slot, our view is maths, coherence, and production values in that order. The maths is the DNA of the game, defining the dynamics of suspense and reward that deliver the dopamine hits players are seeking. Next, coherence brings consideration of logical flow and intuitive play under the microscope. It’s probably no secret that few players ever read the rules of newly released games, so making them behave in a way that’s intuitive and coherent with (though not slavishly copying) other games in the genre is probably a wise idea. Finally, production values add the audio-visual polish to enhance the allure of the overall presentation and complete the package. This last aspect can get over-prioritised in our view, leading to great-looking games that soon lose a player’s interest when it becomes abundantly clear they are just an exercise in tarting up a hackneyed format.

We reckon a 21st Century slot should not only look funky but also avoid clichéd themes – or at least subvert them – to amuse players who are a bit bored of seeing games garnished with wolves, Ptolemaic queens, and ginger Irish pixies smoking clay pipes.

What are your current key markets and how would you characterize the overall feedback for your games that you have received from the gambling community?

We’d hope that our games, whilst being unusual, deliver entertainment that works pretty much universally so we have no rigid focus on specific demographics or territories. As we state on our website, we simply view ourselves as purveyors of playful ideas for the casino curious. We’re very happy that 1x2Network gives us access to a huge potential marketplace to tout our wagering wares, and so we’re working hard to engage with all operators who want to tickle their players’ palates with gaming that’s a little out of the ordinary.

Judging from the reviews and users votes we’ve seen to date on a number of well-respected affiliate sites, it seems the gambling community has warmed to our style and willingness to do different. We’re under no illusions that we’re going to become an overnight success in the industry, but we’re delighted that there already seems to be a lot of authentic interest from players and operators in what we’re up to... and what’s coming around the corner.

...we’re working hard to engage with all operators who want to tickle their players’ palates with gaming that’s a little out of the ordinary.

Can you provide us with teasers for upcoming releases? If not in terms of names and certain features, then in terms of the concept in general?

We’ve got a number of ideas waiting in our skunkworks covering the holy trinity of slot, Instant Win and table gaming genres, and are ready to roll into production when we judge the time is right. 

We’re under no illusions that we’re going to become an overnight success in the industry, but we’re delighted that there already seems to be a lot of authentic interest from players and operators in what we’re up to... and what’s coming around the corner.

As a little tease of the shape of things to come, there are more novel slot mechanics that warp the fabric of space and time – or at least muck about with the traditional reel format to create slot-style gaming elegantly tailored for portrait presentation. This includes a fabulous follow-up Orbital Reactor™ slot to Aeterna, which is on our production line now. We’re also up for innovating with a couple of brand new table game formats of our own invention to bring some dice fun to players who like the idea of Craps but find the wagering baffling, or might fancy something that brings some true strategic skill to shooting dice. And finally, for Instant Win fans, we’ve developed two new formats to complement our Super Selector cards, both encouraging meaningful player interaction and including one we hope to debut with a theme that should amuse anyone interested in hitting ‘pay dirt’! We shall say no more.