Halloween has finally arrived and SlotBeats has presented a special spooky episode of Beyond the Reels to celebrate the frightening festivities taking place.
In this Halloween feature, Simon Jagdhar, Director of Game Studio at Wizard Games, guides viewers through the studio’s latest spooky slot release, Treasures of the Count.
After detailing his role within Wizard Games’ slot production, Jagdhar began to dive into the slot release, which offers a 5×4 reel grid, 40-paylines and a maximum win of up to x2,919 the player’s stake. While presenting several base game and bonus features, the slot uses low volatility with an RTP range of 88.08 to 96.06 per cent.
Explaining why the industry witnesses an abundance of Halloween-themed games at this time of year, Jagdhar said: “Seasonal slots present a great opportunity because of a lot of the work and effort that goes into the seasonal preparation by casinos.
“It’s a very strong period of promotion, emails, text messages, some casinos might go as far as etching out a specific area on the casino homepage just for the seasonal games. Knowing this, providers have an opportunity to feature in all of that promotional activity by making and delivering an on-season game.”
Looking at the slot’s base gameplay, Jagdhar continued: “A good base game is critical to any game. When we make our base game, we always aim to make it as entertaining as possible.
“We want to have good base game features that happen at a good frequency and have a reasonably good average pay to sustain the player’s balance over time. The last thing you want to see is your balance dwindle away in a couple hundred spins. Something needs to happen to boost it back up again.
“So, since our main feature in Treasures of the Count is a hold and spin with cash symbols, we also use cash symbols in the base game to hint at what is going to come later in your bigger feature.”
Delving further into the slot’s main bonus feature, the Count Respins game mode, Jagdhar explained: “It’s a hold and spin but we’ve added a multiplier element to it. It works like a classic hold and spin, you get your three spins to get as many cash symbols as you possibly can.
“The way the multiplier element of the game works is if you fill up a column with cash symbols then there’s going to be a multiplier applied to that column. This multiplier can go as high as x20.”
To listen to Jagdhar detail how Halloween slots can outlive the short holiday to perform well during other seasons and discuss what’s next on Wizard Games’ roadmap for the rest of the year, click the video above.
