Taking the online betting game to a whole new level of social engagement and entertainment
MY ROLE
UI Design
Game Design
Art Direction & Branding
World & Narrative Design
PROJECT DATE
2021 - 2022
CREATIVE TEAM
Matt Marshall - Game Director
Rubens Cesar - 3D Artist
Rafael Arnaud - 3D Artist
William Szafran - Concept Art
COMPANY
Rivalry
Online casino games suck. We wanted to make one with the quality of real video games and the social dynamics of Twitch.
When Rivalry launched Casino.exe, we wanted to give our audience something more than a selection of 3rd party casino games they could find on any site. We wanted to build something original that surpassed anything on the market.
Online casino games are simple, cheap and lonely. We wanted the opposite for our audience of socially engaged gamers and streamers. We wanted to create a community experience. We wanted players to play together and see themselves in the game. We wanted streamers to be able to play with their audience. We wanted to deliver a world with lore and story all rendered in full 3D graphics.
Rushlane was born. An intense automated racing game where up to 30 players can join the race for a small stake. Players would see their character rendered in game and watch them race against other players in real time, while shit talking each other in chat. All the stakes went into a prize pool and the top 3 players took the prize. All from the comfort of the web browser.
Rushlane Vibes Mood Board Collage
Building a World
Applying triple-A game design philosophy to a casino game was a new concept for the industry both from an artistic and technical perspective. In order to create a consistent world that could deliver on the quality we needed, we spend the time to flesh out the lore, characters, artwork and tone of our world:
Welcome to Hub City. A towering metropolis in the midst of the Glitch Crisis: mysterious worlds phasing in and out of existence, disrupting life in the city.
The gangs who rule the streets of Hub City capitalize on the chaos, creating the ultimate illegal death race: Rushlane.
Champions of Rushlane put their lives on the line for riches, glory and power. The fastest rule the streets and the strange multiverse beyond.
Rushlane WEB UI
The Social Dynamic
Beyond the flashy graphics and high speed gameplay, the real revelation with Rushlane was that it was a true social experience that changed the virtual casino game paradigm. No longer was playing online casino games an isolating experience. Players could see each other, chat with each other, watch other players play until they wanted to jump in. This formed communities, rivalries and gave a social space for our players to hang out.
It also gave our streamer partners a new way to interact with their audience. Through Rushlane streamers could play directly with their audience in real time. They could shout cast races. It added tangible entertainment value to their streams and to their viewers.
Designing the Tech
Creating a game that ran in real time, while taking input requests from client browsers all over the world and could deliver a seamless unified experience was no easy feat. Because real money was on the line, we had to make sure that every user was seeing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time, down to the microsecond. And it had to run on any browser on any device. There was no out-of-the-box solution for this.
To ensure every race was fair and dynamic, we developed a physics based randomness engine in Unity that was tested and certified by a 3rd party company.
We created cloud servers running each instance of Rushlane in real time on Unity. All user requests to join a race would be sent to the server, which would pull their profile and betting information and generate an avatar in the game, then give the user confirmation responses. The cloud server would then generate a live video stream of the game and deliver that to all users who were watching the race.
This allowed us to give the users a fully 3D, high fidelity game experience without them needing to run the game on their local device.