Hammertime Games: Redefining innovation, incubation and exploration.

Hammertime Games has been on an exciting journey since the studio was formed, joining Games Global's epic lineup of studios.

The studio's Head of Game Product, Elaine Nagel, recently spoke to Gambling Talk outline the ethos of the studio, its relationship with Stormcraft Studios and how it develops its engaging portfolio of content exclusively for Games Global.

Read the full interview below, originally published by Gambling Talk here

Tell us more about the relationship between Hammertime Games and Stormcraft. What is the studio’s role as a Stormcraft sister brand?

Hammertime is less a sister brand and more a strategic sub-brand that sits under the umbrella of Stormcraft Studios.

The Hammertime brand was born from the desire to increase our agility and responsiveness to the market, and to grow the diversity of our offering across a wider player base.

We exist in such a dynamic market, with constantly developing trends and shifting player preferences. It’s an environment rich for learning, and we wanted to harness this pace of change to keep ourselves at the forefront of the market, delivering games that players love. At the same time, we were eager to widen our market reach through leveraging our portfolio of winning mechanics, applying completely different themes and treatments to capitalise appeal across multiple player demographics.

Hammertime is designed to be flexible and agile, the focus of the brand is to release quick-to-market games that provide valuable data-driven feedback that we can use to inform the design of our games across the portfolio of both studio brands, simultaneously maximising commercial opportunities by leveraging our growing portfolio of successful mechanics to widen our player reach.

The relationship between Hammertime Games and Stormcraft is that the team behind Hammertime Games is the same crew that have been crafting legendary game titles since the inception of Stormcraft Studios, and for many years before. In fact, the collective years of industry experience that we have in the team amounts to a fair few decades.

The team brings all the expertise, quality, and stability to Hammertime games that Stormcraft games are so well known for.

This solid foundation of experience and quality that underpins Hammertime Games helps facilitate a flexible approach: our quality orientation extends past our code and design into our process and thinking around game creation combined with the careful crafting of a practical, commercially driven roadmap that delivers games to the market at the right time and cadence to fulfill market needs. We’re constantly striving to make our games in the most efficient ways, that facilitate configurability and responsive iteration, while keeping stability and quality at the heart of what we do.

From our team’s perspective, the Hammertime strategy provides rich opportunities to flex our creative and technical talents with the diversity of game themes that we bring to the table, on top of the opportunity to try and test new things – from mechanic concepts to solving the various technical and process challenges that leveraging market pace demands.

Talk us through the game development process. What is your ethos when it comes to game creation?

Our Hammertime game development process is centred around collaboration and cohesion, while we lean into the ethos of innovation and the iteration of engaging game mechanics. We encourage and value ideas from across the team and work to create an environment that fosters trying new things, from design ideas and solutions to new work processes and technologies.

Sugar Craze Bonanza™ was the first game that we put through our Hammertime strategy and game development process: we had seen great success with our Multichase mechanic in Stormcraft’s Thunderstruck Stormchaser™ game and were keen to release another version of this mechanic into the market with a totally new look and feel.

With our research pointing to a strongly trending candy genre, we got down to work designing new graphics around the mechanic and put our Hammertime strategy to the test. Leveraging new technologies and work processes, we released our first Hammertime game into the market just a few months later. It was a great success, and definitely marked the start of something sweet!

Incubation is one of three words in your tagline. Can you tell us more about what that entails and how that enables you to stand out from competitors?

For us, ‘Incubation’ exists hand in hand with our principles of ‘Innovation’ and ‘Exploration’, while always considering speed to market. It’s the result of this interconnected relationship that enables us to stand out from our competitors.

So, it’s about ‘Exploring’ those key things that inform great games: understanding the market and what players are looking for, figuring out the best way to deliver product into the market at the right time to ensure our games offer what players are looking for.

This needs to be coupled with ‘Innovation’: trying new ideas in response to what we’re seeing; trying new ways of working, new technologies and efficiencies that enable us to be more agile and responsive, and testing new themes on proven mechanics that players love to play.

And then ‘Incubating’ these ideas and learnings in an environment in which we can grow them, adding our learnings, insights and discoveries and iterating these ideas forward to build on their success.

Our two most recent Hammertime game releases are Mega Magic Spell™ (which went live in February this year), and Pizza Fiesta™ (set to go global on 19 June), have been the incubation games for our Cash-On-Reels Collect mechanic. We are seeing good success with the mechanic and are currently working on adding the next level of enhancement to it, making it even more exciting for our players.

In what markets are you currently seeing most success with your titles and how do you ensure your content delivers what players want?

Regarding delivering what players want, we spend a lot of time playing games and gathering market research to understand current and developing trends, what players are engaging with and why, and most importantly – what’s fun and appealing about playing top performing games in the industry!

Coupled with that is the fantastic advantage we have of being able to consult with our various Games Global business partners and strategy teams to bolster and deepen our understanding of the market.

We put a lot of focus on creating great content that resonates with players, building games that are entertaining, easy to understand, friendly and fun to play, and that offer an environment in which players feel comfortable and entertained.

In Mega Magic Spell™ and Pizza Fiesta™, we put a lot of focus on our collect characters, we really wanted these characters to drive the mechanic and connect with the player by building a rich sense of excitement, anticipation, and celebration.

In Mega Magic Spell™, our characterful Owl Collects hoot in celebration when awarding players their coin collection wins, and in Pizza Fiesta™, our party-loving host – Chef Flavio – takes the player on a party-filled culinary adventure complete with a vibey disco celebration in free spins.

It’s probably clear to see the question that we constantly ask ourselves throughout our Hammertime game development process: “How will this game entertain our players and make them smile?”

To view the studio's current and upcoming portfolio of games, visit hammertimegames.com and follow Hammertime Games on on LinkedIn .