Summary
Hard Rock is known for their restaurants, but their resort casinos are the brand’s most extensive and lucrative business line. Our Greentube Pro platform was selected by Hard Rock International and the Seminole Tribe of Florida to develop their cross-platform social casino games, where players earn rewards towards their next resort visit.
My Role
I was the Creative Director at BlueBat Games where I led the design and marketing teams. The first phase of development (2018) was about one year, initially launching with six customized experiences for each Florida property. We later expanded to include a dozen additional Hard Rock properties throughout North America and internationally.
Design
We were invited to tour the six Hard Rock and Seminole casinos and met with every marketing team, plus the Hard Rock HQ team in Orlando. I directed the concept phase and pitched our gamified take on the Hard Rock brand, pushing the best visuals we could while developing natively on mobile. I set up the art team’s workflow and documentation for front-end implementation. I also brought in and managed outsourced talent when needed, and reviewed builds in detail to keep all the visuals, animations, and sound design on brand.
Testing
We had separate front-end dev teams for each platform (iOS, Android, and web) and they were quite siloed developing natively and separately from each other. I ran UX workshops with everyone together where they evaluated features on platforms they didn’t usually work on. The format of these workshops was based on a fantastic talk I attended by Laura Teeples entitled, “We Don’t Have Time for UX” and they were productive and positively received.
The riskiest feature was the property selector, which wasn’t part of the white label platform we originally developed. Most players tend to stick to their favourite casino, but we still needed to test this use case extensively to make sure every moving part was in the right place.
Launch and Live Ops
I set up configurable graphic workflows for ASO, branded emails, and social media templates in conjunction with Hard Rock’s online team. This included coordinating monthly marketing calendars driven by our data analysts, and events and sweepstakes with the land-based casinos, plus hundreds of marketing graphics every month.
Takeaways
Developing this cross-platform project was a challenge since it was created before migrating to React Native, so making even small changes was not trivial. Some changes could affect other casinos on the Greentube Pro platform as well. Nonetheless, our innovative platform resonated with Hard Rock fans and it became an integral part of their global digital presence.