Sharks and Underwater Themes Popular In The Casino Space
A surprising number of marine themed games ranging from the fantastic (Mystical Mermaid, Neptune's Kingdom) to the more realistic (Shark Week) had gained in popularity in land-based casinos. It was only natural for Doubledown to create an original title for the Fort Knox lineup.
Preparatory to starting team work on Deep Sea Frenzy, the resident selachophile of Doubledown, yours truly, ended up watching over 12 hours of documentary footage, sketching sharks, rays, turtles, squid, cuttlefish, coral and other deep sea creatures.
Shark Fact #1: Rays and sharks are actually cousins belonging to the class, Elasmobranchs. Elasmobranchs have cartilage instead of bone skeletons.
Reel Color Comps and Background Roughs
I rough in colors quickly as a map for all the artists working on the project. This enables the art directors to get a feel for the visual density and to make sure that the symbol hierarchy stays intact.
At this time, I also developed three environment concepts for the states of the game:
Base Game: The Coral Reef: A bright, colorful, and shallow environment, where if sharks venture, they dominate. You can see both the surface and the sand and coral beds below. Smaller fish dart around.
Respin Bonus: The Pelagic Depths. During this time, black and white pearls can be collected and trigger respins. The pelagic zones are the parts of the upper ocean away from the coastal environments and where the largest sea animals dwell. This environment is vaster than the Coral Reef, and sharks are a more ominous presence here. Colours are dark with fluorescing accents.
Free Spins: The Kelp Forest. The Shark Majors scatter the little Minor symbols, who go into hiding. The Kelp Forest, green, lush, thick, is a great place for fish to hide when sharks go on the hunt.
Each environment needs to be instantly identifiable as a distinct game state, and with these color comps, our artists were able to proceed.
Storyboards for Animation
I connected multiple transitions, trying to utilize elements that could be made modular and tinted. Ultimately we pared our transitions down to a single shark "glass-smash" but you can still see that some of these animation designs were used as components of that transition.
Reel Bezel and Dialog Development
Using Illustrator and a footprint of another recent slot, I was able to craft a distinct, simple, but fin-themed reel bezel. Ultimately it was decided that while the gold played brightly off the blue waters, we could get a more immersive feeling by tinting it blue and giving it accent corals to tie into the reef art. (Blue re-colour seen below in final screenshots, and was done by Andy McCulloch.)
Symbols
Fortunately, I was able to get to paint two of the symbols myself. (Not always the case, even when you make the original sketches.) I was particularly pleased to paint the ray and the cuttlefish, two favorite marine animals.
Putting It All Together
We populated the symbols, background, reel bezel, and our musician, Marc Pierucci created themes to go with our three environments. The main game (Coral Reef) had a sort of adventurous aquatic feel, while the Pelagic Depths and the Kelp Forest Free Spins got escalating rock riffs to boost excitement. I was pleased with how well the three different game states differentiated from each other.
Users responded positively to this game, and it won our January 2021 Spin-off over Legendary Bison, garnering almost 30% more spins.
Additional Art Credits
Art Direction: Brian Porterfield, Rhonda Conley
Backgrounds: Stephen Peringer
Bezel Re-color, Logo, Text Treatment: Andy McCulloch
Additional Symbols: Lyndon Asuncion, Ashley Lindsey, Brian Porterfield
Music: Marc Pierucci