SPACE BLAST
Neon’s Bonus Blast from Ainsworth takes animation to a new dimension
By Frank Legato
There are a few slot games out there with funny alien themes, but Neon’s Bonus Blast, a new video slot from Ainsworth Game Technology, takes the comedic alien character to the next level.
The game itself provides a clever adaptation of the pot-collection feature. Neon’s Bonus Blast is a three-title game family—Neon Blast Blazen, Lumina and Geodia—presented on the sleek A-STAR Raptor cabinet.
The base game is a five-reel, 30-line layout, in which each reel spot is actually an individual reel.
But what makes it special is the star of the game, “Neon,” a little green alien that sits in a spaceship between two colorful fuel pods. (These are the collection pods in the game.) As the game progresses, Neon comes alive in 3D animation, slinging a “blaster” weapon to shoot cash symbols, and popping out at various times to help the player win.
According to Keith Kruczynski, Ainsworth’s vice president of studios-North America, the appeal of this game starts with compelling animation. “Normally, the mechanic side or the math side will drive a game,” he says. “This game was 100 percent driven by art.”
The advanced visuals come thanks to a game development platform called Unity— Neon’s Bonus Blast is the first Ainsworth game from this particular Ainsworth studio to use this technology. “Unity gives us more control,” says David Cox, the graphic designer who helped create the 3D effects on Neon’s Bonus Blast. “Normally, when we do games, it’s a lot of images that we put together. This is the first time we were able to make a real-time 3D character in casino games. Normally, you’ll see a 3D character that’s been rendered and then brought in as 2D images and then composited. This is a real 3D character that we can manipulate in real time with game events. We can blend animations.”
With the technology in place, the team searched for a theme that would exploit it to the maximum effect. That came at an annual “game summit” meeting Ainsworth holds every year to throw around new game ideas. At last December’s meeting, Danny Pan, a senior artist at Ainsworth, pitched the idea of an alien theme.
“The initial idea came about because, going out to the field to see what’s out there, I just didn’t see a lot of exciting alien themes or space themes,” Pan says. “I wanted to do something fun. The inspiration comes from a lot of the older, classic Disney and Pixar movies—a fun little character that is cute, and travels around space to different planets to collect treasures and gems.”
Pan did the preliminary drawings of the alien character, and Cox, along with Peter Aponte— another veteran animator and 3D specialist with experience at several slot suppliers—took over with the Unity program to transform the “rig”—the basic skeleton of a 3D character— into a true 3D image.
With Unity, “we can manipulate game events in real time, and we can blend animations, so we had to figure that out,” Cox says. “Me and Pete went back and forth with Neon’s model for months. He ultimately came up with the rig and then in Unity I had to figure out how to manipulate and translate his animations.”
Cox says the Unity game engine blends animations seamlessly. “This gave us whole new ways to do things, including dynamic lighting. Neon has actual lighting, so if he moves around, shadows move when he fires his gun. That’s a glow across the screen that we didn’t bake in.”
Aponte adds that the finished animation is as high in quality as live-action 3D animation, in which people are filmed wearing special suits and their movements later digitized. “I wish we had that, just to see my coworkers in little spandex suits with the little tennis balls stuck to them,” he laughs.
“That would have been hilarious. But unfortunately, we had to do key framing, kind of the old-fashioned way. All the skeletal structures of the character had to be positioned and animated. You pose them, get the position right, and blend in between.”
Then, there was the matter of how Neon would sound. “There was this huge variety of people who interviewed for the voice of Neon, which our sound engineer Aaron Caroll put together,” says Kruczynski. “We went through dozens of different voices, and when we heard the right one, there was no question. We said, that’s what he sounds like.”
Kruczynski says Neon sounds a little like Stitch, the famous character in Disney’s Lilo and Stitch movie—“a kind of garbled voice, but you kind of understand him. He’s cool and he’s cute, but he’s got a little attitude. We’ve got him cussing at you (in a garbled sort of way). He’s a real person, and has that voice that people can identify with, and can laugh at. It wasn’t easy to match that voice to the actual mouth movements, but the team knocked it out of the park.”
The Game
The Ainsworth team brought all these factors together to create one of the most entertaining games you’ll find. At various points in the game, Neon makes wisecracks, dances, and even does a hang-10 surfing routine.
The pots are red and blue fuel pods in Neon’s spaceship, which burst to trigger an enhanced free-game feature. Vacuums on both suck up energy from the reels when orbs appear. The fuel pods get larger with each orb, until one or both of them burst to trigger the free games.
“These energy orbs increase the size of the canisters, and they grow and grow,” Kruczynski says, “and even when they fill up, they can like bulge out and get even bigger. David did a great job on getting them to look like they’re about to burst. It makes you think that you’re getting closer and closer to that feature.”
If Neon lands in the center reel in the primary game, he takes out his blaster and zaps all cash-on-reels credits and jackpot symbols on the screen for instant awards. But if one of the pots bursts, Neon remains parked in the center reel for the free games and shoots his blaster at every cash-on-reels or jackpot symbol that lands on the screen. That includes the top Grand progressive, which resets at $10,000.
“That’s really one of the fun parts of the game,” Kruczynski says. “It’s not like a hold-and-spin feature where you have to fill all 15 reel spots. At any given time, you can collect the Grand, even in the base game.”
This is boosted higher by the pot enhancement for the bonus round. The red pot blasts the reels with cash-on-reels symbols that lock in place for the remainder of the feature, and are awarded repeatedly. The blue pot increases the value of all cash-on-reels symbols—even the progressives—when blue symbols land on a free spin. If both enhancements are in place, the locked cash-on-reels symbols increase in value with every spin, and the values are awarded after every spin.
The free games start at eight, and special symbols can extend the feature for more free spins when landing.
There is also a friendly robot named “EX7” that expands the reels up to four, five or a maximum six rows high for one 60- line spin. This feature can occur during the primary game or the freespin feature.
Neon’s Bonus Blast will hit the casinos by the end of July. Look for them first in Oklahoma and Northern California.
Just watch for a little green man in a spaceship, in fluid animation, as he flies between planets.
And watch out for those orbs.
NEON’S BONUS BLAST
Ainsworth Game Technology
SLOT TYPE
Five-reel, 30-line video slot; pot-collection and free-spin bonus events; 01, .02, .05 and .10 denominations
PAYBACK % RANGE
88%-94%
AVERAGE HIT FREQUENCY
Approximately 30%
TOP JACKPOT
Progressive; $10,000 reset
