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Thanks for taking the time to join us for our interview series. Could you please introduce yourself to our readers?
Hey SlotsCalendar! Thanks for taking the time to chat with us! I’m Bryan Upton, the Founder of Lucksome. I’ve been in Casino Games Design for about 16 years now. I’ve been a game artist, a games designer, studio manager, product manager and then C-Level management. I’ve worked in the online space about as much as in land-based. I worked out of Vegas, London and Malta and have been around the world to see how players play different games in different settings. I founded Lucksome in Sept 2020. Lucksome is about making well-made games with transparency, awesome graphics, and the best mathematics in the world.
We started off simply because we wanted to do something in a less chaotic and corporate environment. We’ve all worked at the big studios and felt that we can do better by staying small, focusing on game design quality and what it is players out there want.
What would you say are the benefits of your games?
Quality. Transparency. Diversity. We don’t compromise on quality, even with our simpler, more classic game (like Coins on Fire from earlier this year) detail and polish is everything. Transparency: we show more stats on our games so that players know what our games are about. Diversity: take a look at our portfolio. Our games are very diverse in themes, mechanics and math profiles. We are masters at what we do, but Lucksome is new and is out to impress and build player trust.
How do you ensure players’ loyalty?
Inform more on the stats of the games we make. Players can make up their mind if this is the game for them or not. We build games that players like, are fun and have good math behind the pay structures. Right now it is about getting the Lucksome brand out there and more players seeing us and learning about us.
Your latest release, Saint Nicked, immerses you into the Christmas spirit, from fun sound effects to the festive design. How popular are these themed slots among players?
Well the game has been live for a few weeks now and it has been incredibly popular, way beyond our expectations, so I would say very! Everyone likes a good story and a laugh along with some naughtiness, what’s not to love?
Saint Nicked has been out for a few weeks now; can you tell us how it has performed so far?
It is our best launch to date! Almost every game we launch is breaking our records but Saint Nicked has smashed it and continues to smash it, we are very proud and pleased.
Retrospectively, is there anything you wish you’d done differently?
I think we have learned a lot from Saint Nicked and there are ALWAYS things you would do differently, but I think we will spend time working on the progression mechanics to tune them for even better experiences.
Saint Nicked has a lot of fun features, but one of them really catches our eye: Advent Calendar. What can you tell us about it?
So… the lovely Advent Calendar trail feature: The bar meter is what triggers the advent calendar. The bar meter has essentially four different colors according to which of the prizes you’re going for. You’ll see the advent calendar has doors one to twenty-five, and each one of those will have a color associated with it according to the color of a bauble: green, red or gold (and then there is the star on the top of the tree). If your next door is a green bauble – which is lowest in terms of prize amount – the bar meter will be green; the bar meter always shows what your next prize is based on its color in the advent calendar. Then you have beer glass sub-symbols on top of the reel symbols that arrive with numbers in them; every time you land one, they will top up the bar meter. For any spin where you don’t get a sub symbol, the bar meter will reset.
What you’re looking for is to keep the streak going until it hits the number you need to trigger the Advent Calendar and get the prize behind the door. A green will need 20, a red needs 40, and a gold needs 60 beers.
This sounds like quite a lot but we’ve added safe points. Once you reach a safe point, the meter will always reset back down to that safe point; it won’t go all the way down to the bottom.
Once you build the bar meter to the relevant target, the advent calendar appears and you open whichever day’s window you’re up to. It will then spin in either a cash prize, or launch the free games bonus.
As you move up the calendar, you’ll get to the top, which is the 25th, and hit the big one – the star on top of the tree covered with toilet paper. From there you will win a higher-than-average number of free games. Once you’ve unlocked the 25th door, you’re then in “Advent Calendar Plus Mode” and you can trigger door 25 over and over again. You’ve now got a new way of triggering free games and on average you’re getting more free games on average triggered when you open the 25th door than if you triggered them normally in the game. The game will also now start to record how many times you’ve won the star and also what the last number of free games you won were, so it’s a nice little achievement on the top.
With your Christmas release taken care of, what can we look forward to from Lucksome in 2023?
Yes! Treasure of the Dead™ HyperLines™. It is a lovely expanding symbol with the Wild and Bonus Scatter in one game, but with a wonderful difference. We have added 3 extra winlines to the 10 normal lines. These extra HyperLines™ have escalating multipliers so any win combos on them pay the normal winline AND the HyperLine with its multiplier. The Books Wild Scatter symbols can carry scarabs on the front of them. They are collected against each HyperLine. Once you have 3 or more you activate it. The HyperLine multiplier will then be upgraded by the collected scarabs and any new scarabs that spin in on that row! HyperLines™ don’t deactivate until they are won on and the collected scarabs are used up, so these multipliers can go VERY high and can turn a normal 3 of a Kind win into a Big Win. We think our new HyperLines™ mechanic is a game changer! In Free Game the HyperLines™ are ALWAYS active, the multipliers don’t reset AND they pay TWICE, once on lines and then AGAIN on the Expanding Symbols!! The Game will be out in Q1 so keep an eye out for it! We have a new super high payout potential game in the works, and we have a brand new game pay mechanic coming, something we have never done before and we think is very unique. These should be all coming in the first half of 2023!
In a market with hundreds of game studios, how does Lucksome differentiates itself from the other competitors?
As with any category of product where there is such a huge choice, there are a lot of low quality products out there, quality is key to stand out.
Great games and great game design is hugely important. We’re working on exciting games that will stand out because they are unique, or they are just well made, and are exciting to play.
We put a lot of time into our games visuals and mathematics to provide a clear indication to our players what each game will do. A key difference to Lucksome games is information. We like to give players much more transparency in how our games will play and the math profile will feel so players feel they can trust what they see and if it’s a right fit for them.