Caesars Entertainment Inc. Total Touch with Ballys DM Display Manager

I was contracted to help Caesars to port the Total Touch Flash application running on the IGT NEXGEN platform to also run on the Ballys DM platform in March 2010 and the games were deployed to casino properties by September 2010.

Caesars had an existing Flash application, Total Touch, that allowed Total Rewards members to view their reward credit balance, order drinks and receive real time offers at the games. Total Touch was built by a combination of software engineers at Caesars, IGT (International Gaming Technology), WRG (William Ryan Group) and Bally Technology.

When I started Total Touch only worked on the IGT NEXGEN hardware with a display about the size of a dollar bill. The touch screen application would send messages to slot accounting system and other services. Casino patrons would interact with the touch screen to check their reward credits, order beverages, download interactive offers credits to the game from their house accounts and receive bonus credits while playing the games based on play.

The Bally DM (Display Manager) used a different solution with hardware accelerated video mixing technology to broadcast multiple video inputs onto a single display so the mixed content playing on the same screen could be run by separate processors and be maintained independently. I was the senior flash developer at Caesars responsible for creating the port of the existing Total Touch application from the NEXGEN to also run on the Ballys DM platform.

Part of my conversion efforts were to identifying and document the messaging sequences for all customer facing transactions used by Total Touch. I made several interactive Flash flow chart that were a huge hit that would walk through each transaction step by step with screen shots. I also documented how the application was built since the previous several rounds of developers had not created any documentation. I compiled a 50+ page Power Point deck with hundreds of detailed images and descriptions of how the system worked and common tasks like updating the BOD (Beverage on Demand) menus.

Technologies used included Flash CS3, FlashDevelop, ActionScript 2 and 3, XML, Photoshop CS3, local connections and socket messaging.

Top