Who Am I

Welcome! I'm Scott Slomiany. I'm pretty lucky to have a fairly unique professional career so far. I'm an experienced game designer and game developer, and for the last 18 years or so, my focus has been on creating pantentable casino game concepts.

Currently, I work with a very small group of people at Leading Edge Design, which is a dedicated group of 3rd party developers tasked with the idea of selling game ideas to 1st party manufacturers. And since 1st party manufacturers don't want to pay outside people to do stuff that they can do in-house, we have to look at things from an "out of the box" angle a bit more than most developers. We also develop various casino games for online social casinos and European online lottery gaming systems.

Working for a small design studio, everyone is expected to wear many hats, but people still fall into generalized comfortable roles based on their expertise. My roles are that of the game designer and prototype developer, where I do a combination of conceptual design, artwork and animation, math models, and programming of rapid prototypes of game ideas in Unity (and earlier, in Director). These are then used to as a starting point for the final target product to prevent the "little surprise problems" that normally occur in the final development process. When the actual final product work begins, I further expand my role in developing content for final result.

In short, my job description doesn't really have a title, but what I do is broad yet simple: do whatever it takes to get a concept to playable prototype, and then through final production as efficiently as possible.

Where I've Been

Looking further back, I'm a proud member of the creative family tree that was spawned from roots of the coin-op powerhouse that was known as Williams / Bally / Midway Games. Originally hired as an animator for the dot matrix display on pinball machines of the early and mid 90s, I found myself bouncing between the pinball group and the nascent beginnings of the upstart WMS Gaming slot machine department.

In the second half of my decade at that company, my roles included becoming a 3D artist and animator for the Pinball 2000 project, an apprentice pinball game designer, and a slot machine designer for the early Dot-Mation games that WMS produced, including Big Bang Piggy Bankin' and Monopoly - Advance to Boardwalk.

In Short...

I’ve done everything from creating logos and informational layouts to directing voice-over talent to photo-montaging Alex Trebek and various Jeopardy artwork pieces to fit on large oddly-shaped plexiglass panels. I am as comfortable building full scale mockups in foamcore as I am in pushing pixels around on a screen. I am often juggling between multiple projects at once, ensuring that each deliverable beats the target deadline. And I am happy to do all of it!

Playable Demonstrations and Prototypes

This is a small sample of demonstration prototype games that I have worked on. As the main game designer at LED, I am responsible for creating playable demos of games so we can test game concepts quicky, flesh out math models efficiently, and create presentation packages before we implement them "in real life". The ability of getting a project demo up and running within a few days and quickly being able to make changes to it is the number one goal.

In addition to programming these demos, many of these demos also include my artwork in varying degrees.

This is a small collection of the full library of demos that I have. These are all related to games that have actually been relased "into the wild" somewhere in the world. There are many more demos of concepts and idea that are still under the protection of intellectual property that I can't show publically. If needed, a private showing of those applications can be arranged during an interview.

Originally I used Macromedia/Adobe Director for prototyping, and then as that product faded away to obscurity, I dabbled in Flash for a little bit before I switched over to Unity. All of the demo prototypes below are done in Unity.

These demonstration programs were put together with the final result being a desktop application. And while creating a WebGL version of these games is a simple as flipping a switch in Unity...it should be noted that none of the examples below were optimized for WebGL, so they will suffer from things like audio clipping, animation compression, slow frame rates, strange font replacements, and really slow loading speed.

On the other hand, the games also will occasionally have a few "test mode toggles" onscreen as a result from the interative design process which you are free to play with. However, I can't promise that may function like you expect them to. In a world of rapid prototyping demos, there's a lot of yelling "Hey can you given me the option to do this?" being yelled at from one office to another, so the test switches weren't meant to be pretty, but meant to be implemented quickly.

Games Without Demos

These are a few other notable games that I have worked on, without playable demos.

Slot machine and video poker games that I have worked on have appeared....

• In casinos via WMS Gaming and IGT.
• In social casinos via Ruby Seven Studios apps such as Trop World, Ruby Seven Video Poker, Lucky North Casino, and Best Bet Casino.
• In online casinos, you can find games I've worked on at GameTwist.com.
• In Norway, I've created game for their Multix video gaming system through Norsk Tipping.

Hit It With The Sparkle Hammer

I love working in After Effects, especially in combination with Particle Illusion. Unfortunately in the games environment, a lot of After Effect treatments are done as tiny parts that get added together as a part of a larger extended presentation package within the game.

I did manage to find a few "big showy things", which are clickable down below.

3-D, Animated, Or Something Else

Aside from just creating demonstration prototypes, I also have done artwork for many games. In addition to the artwork shown in the demo programs and the After Effects sections above, here are a few further samples, which include Lightwave 3-D, Photoshop, and Illustrator.

Large Format Experiences

For a time, large communal gaming experiences were a thing in casinos. Seeing that this was a trend, I spent some time concocting ideas for large format experiences. One of them made it into production: Wheel of Fortune Experience, which became the 1st game on the Center Stage platform for IGT. Below is a collection of these big ideas.