Making of HunterX

01 · The idea

A Hunter instead of a multiplier symbol

In most tumble slots, multipliers are symbols that fall onto the board. We wanted ours to come from someone: a Hunter standing beside the board with a rifle. The X is his.

After a winning tumble the Hunter may fire. His shot adds +1 to +25 to a running X, and that X multiplies every later tumble win of the round, on top of any snare. In a hunt, it carries across every spin.

The hard part was how often he should fire: too rarely and he is scenery, too reliably and the shot means nothing. Early builds also wasted more than half of his base-game shots at the very end of a chain, with nothing left to multiply. So now, if a base round ends with an unused X, up to two extra boards drop with that X standing. They are not a guaranteed win, but the shot gets its chance.

02 · Three hunts

Three hunts, three rules

Three, four, or five or more Bullets as a spin lands open the Bird, Wild or Big Game Hunt, each with 10 to 16 spins that can retrigger.

For a while the hunts only looked different. They shared one paytable, so even a Bird Hunt was mostly paid by bears, moose and bison. Now every hunt has its own paytable, and its three animals are denser on the reels.

In 1.1.4 each hunt also got its own rule, and the rule belongs to the hunt, not to the way in: it plays the same whether Bullets opened it, a lure helped, or it was bought.

The Trophy Wall taught us our favourite lesson. In its first version, every winning group of the big animals mounted a trophy, three crowned a MONARCH, and a crown paid ×2. On paper it worked. In play, almost every hunt crowned all three animals within its first few spins, and the tension was gone. So we made trophies harder to earn: only groups of 7 or more mount one, two crown, and a MONARCH pays ×3. Now a crown is an event, and not every hunt gets one.

We now review how the math feels, not just its numbers.

03 · Worlds and the Hunter

Building the worlds and the Hunter

We fixed one look before anything else: cold moonlight and warm lantern light, on wood, brass and snow. Each tier has its metal: bronze for the birds, silver for the forest animals, gold for the big game. The medallions wear it, and in a hunt the board's frame glows in it.

The base game sits by a lake tower. The Bird Hunt moves to a misty wetland, the Wild Hunt into a deep pine forest and the Big Game Hunt up to snowy peaks, from the lightest, most open night to the strongest. Every night moves, and each hunt has its own music, ambience and far-off animal calls.

Our strictest rule for motion: nothing stretches. Reeds, ferns and branches move as themselves while the night behind them stays still. Feathers and leaves turn and drift instead of squashing. Only water is allowed to ripple.

The lantern on the board's frame shows how far we went for small things. We rebuilt it in 3D around its artwork, so it swings on its hook as one piece and its glass and brass catch the scene's warm and cold light. The frame, bandolier and crest got depth too, so the lantern's glow moves across the post as it swings.

The Hunter is built from separate animation clips: standing, raising the rifle, aiming, firing, lowering. The joins were the hard part. We measured every cut so his boots never jump, and, wherever we could, swapped ghosting cross-fades for clean cuts on matching poses. In 1.1.4 we rebuilt his shot: the recoil is a rigid kick of his upper body and rifle, driven in code at your screen's refresh rate, and the muzzle flash takes its warm light from the scene.

04 · Phones

Making it run well on phones

We wanted the phone to be a first-class way to play, not a squeezed desktop: its own portrait and landscape layouts, and a tall version of every night with the same motion, including a new view of the base night that fits the tower and the moon.

Phones also taught us that heat matters more than speed. At the highest resolution, an iPhone ran smoothly for a while, then warmed up and slowed down for good. So we removed work nobody could see: layers hidden under the moving night are no longer drawn, phones skip an anti-aliasing pass that made no visible difference, and the Hunter is drawn without an extra pass. After that, a 16-minute autoplay test on an iPhone stayed close to 60 frames per second.

We also tracked down memory leaks that made long sessions heavier round after round, and gave every wait inside a round a time limit, so a round cannot get stuck on an animation. In 1.1.4 we smoothed the win bursts on phones, made the loading screen appear about four times sooner and fixed an iPhone first visit where the night could stay frozen. The game now opens on a moving night, never a black screen.

05 · Review rounds

Review rounds, and what they changed

Before HunterX went live it went through several review rounds, and more than once it came back with notes. Some stung. We treated each one as a to-do list.

1. 01The bet bar. Rebuilt more than once, it ended as one rail where balance, win and bet share a plate beside a brass spin dome.
2. 02Motion. Every animal now reacts before its win bursts into feathers, leaves or a warm flash, big wins climb from BIG to SUPER, MEGA and EPIC, the Hunter's shot is a tracer that travels into its target, and the board lands as a cascade.
3. 03Depth. Brass snares that multiply the wins on their cells, three optional lures (2× the bet per spin) that make the hunt you choose more frequent, a bought hunt that can upgrade one step, and finally the three hunt rules.
4. 04Cuts. We let go of things we had worked hard on: the short films before each hunt, then the mist that carried you into one. Now a rifle scope closes on the board, the hunt's night appears in the lens, the red reticle locks and the scope opens onto the hunt. On the way out, the Hunter fires.