The visual style is the first thing players notice when they open a new slot. But how exactly do game designers craft unique and captivating visuals for online slot machines?
Are you referring to gambling sites? I don’t use them, but your question is too broad to answer. It’s a bit like asking how someone builds an airplane or a house.
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I’m unsure why you deleted your last post while I was writing a response, but I’ll answer it anyway.
In the past, before I got tired of it, I used to design large websites for government agencies and newspapers where the budgets were typically in the six-figure range. Slot machines differ from websites, but the UX/UI principles are the same.
I’d take my best guesses based on experience when designing the first site iterations. Once we had a prototype, we would hire a company to do user testing, which was always fun and informative since we would sit behind a two-way mirror to watch the facilitator engage with the participants as they used the prototypes.
For example, if the facilitator asked the participants to accomplish a task using the website, and some clicked the wrong button, got confused, or took too long to reach the correct spot on the site, we would know we had a UX problem we needed to fix. We often went through several iterations of redos, tweaks, and focus groups before we were satisfied.
With slot machines, whether they’re in casinos or online, user testing can take place in real time with real users.
In a casino, for example, with 20 slot machines, the casino might have the same interface on all 20, but ten of the machines might have a yellow background, while the other ten have an orange background, which would set the stage for what’s called A/B testing.
If, over a week, players using slots with the orange background played for five minutes longer on average than the yellow background, that would be evidence for the orange background delivering higher returns for the casino than the yellow background.
With this type of real-time user testing, it’s possible to tweak every aspect of the game to see which iterations work best. Since I’m not a gambler, it’s a mystery to me why slot machine players are most engaged by the most cluttered and garish interfaces imaginable, but it’s difficult to argue with the results of the A/B testing.