Meet the Developer – Black Pudding Games
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Black Pudding Games is a studio that is on a mission to do things differently.
From its stand-out name to its suite of innovative and exciting slots, casino games and scratchcards, Black Pudding is quickly making a name for itself.
Here at Casino Kings we are huge fans of the developer’s Super Selector Scratchcard series, which includes titles such as Slice & Dice and Bun in the Oven.
These simply games deliver unrivalled entertainment while also providing the opportunity to win big from small stakes, instantly. What more could you want!
We sat down with Nathan & Dan from Black Pudding Games to learn more…
Black Pudding Games – how did you come up with such a stand-out name for a game studio?
It came about during a relaxed lunchtime meeting in a Norwich café early in the company’s formation. We were mucking about with names, looking for something striking and a little eccentric – nothing too obviously corporate and prosaic.
After several suggestions – many of which would be unprintable here – one of us spotted the special-of-the-day in the café was a black pudding dish. The idea of ‘Black Pudding Games’ made us laugh, and when the strapline of ‘It’s In The Blood’ flowed pretty much immediately from that, it just seemed like fate had played its hand.
The black pudding dish that inspired us was delicious by the way and, no, we hadn’t been drinking either.
How did the studio come about and who is the driving force behind the operation?
Black Pudding Games was founded in 2018 by a trio of like-minded mavericks who’d amassed a combined experience of more than 30 years in the casino gaming and entertainment industry.
Surveying the game development scene, the feeling was that there was room for a studio that didn’t just pay lip service to being different but would ‘do different’ in creating gaming formats that weren’t afraid to break the mould with their mechanics and themes.
We feel there’s no point recreating the past – finding the breakout hits of tomorrow is where we’re at. Original bangers rather than stale cover versions. As we state on our website, we’re not just another bloody sausage factory.
To answer who is the driving force in Black Pudding, we’d say it’s more a matter of what. Curiosity is our driving force. What can we make that ‘does different’, is commercially viable and won’t lose the crowd? We’re curious, in both senses of the word.
How do you approach game development? What do you do differently to other studios?
We don’t presume to know how other studios approach their game development, but at Black Pudding we go with the gut. Forget focus groups and following trends set by other studios.
Anyone in the team can pitch an idea but we always test it against key questions such as does it have some initial, seductive novelty that is unlike other instant wins, table games or slots in casino lobbies? Does it make us laugh like Squeaky Blinders, or go ‘wow’ at its audacious concept like Aeterna?
If so, we then get busy to custom build an adaptable maths model for it that will deliver a satisfying experience for players, considering the dynamics of risk and reward that underpin all good casino games.
Once we have that blueprint and know the game’s probabilities and payouts ‘work’, the game’s production values go under our microscope. That step ensures the visual and sonic design do justice to the idea, and (very importantly) it’ll be the dog’s dangly bits in portrait mode on mobiles.
The Pudding is all over mobile portrait mode, since that’s how a huge number of players want to play today. Once all that’s in place, we can hand on to the coders who weave their obscure magic to bring it all together for final testing and release.
Can you tell us a bit more about your Super Selector Scratchcard series?
We favour the principle of ‘show don’t tell’ so would advocate having a play of one of our Super Selector Scratchcards rather than have us bang on about them. That said, we feel they’re good representatives of the Black Pudding style, bringing some atypical, off-beat humour to instant wins combined with a mechanism that is genuinely new to online scratchcard play.
They make a virtue of the player actually making choices about the order in which they reveal what’s hidden in the game’s nine zones. The fewer picks you need to reveal a win, the bigger that win will be.
What makes scratchcards so much fun to play? Why should players play them?
The simplicity of online scratchcards is a big part of the draw. Their rules are quick to understand, and there’s a particular thrill in the hide and seek aspect of finding enough matching symbols under the scratch ‘panels’ to trigger a win.
The Super Selectors go the extra mile though, with themes that cover emergency surgery, zero-tolerance pest control and bare-knuckled baking jeopardy skilfully blended with the aforementioned interactivity that rewards crafty play. Players should play them because they’re great!
Aeterna is like no other slot we have seen – tell us more about it. How does the Orbital Reactor work?
Whilst it’s a seriously funky looking gaming machine, the Orbital Reactor™ engine that powers Aeterna comes from the tradition of slot gameplay to make it intuitive to slot fans. To win, players are simply looking for a spin to land three or more matching symbols on any neighbouring positions on the game’s Orbital Paypath – a single circular payline that traces through all the six outer symbols in view.
Better yet, a win will trigger a cascade event, which can lead to a potentially unlimited chain reaction of further rewards with each new event boosted by an escalating win multiplier. If the Reactor goes nuts you can pull in up to 10,000x your stake!
Aeterna was our first Orbital Reactor™ slot, but we’re excited to announce that a new release, Atomic Reactor, has just been released in to the wild. It’s a seriously mesmerizing machine that can generate some electrifying wins, so we’re confident that Casino Kings’ players will love taking on this mission with fission.
What can we expect to see leaving the Black Pudding Games production line in the coming months?
The Black Pudding team is still locked on target to ‘do different’ for fans of new games, and we have a fistful of fresh formats in our skunkworks being fettled for future release into the wild. Quality not quantity is one of our watchwords, plus we like to surprise so, for now, we’re going to be little teases and keep you guessing . . .