Jordie Wagner, Co-Founder and CTO of Mirror Image Gaming, is helping reshape how burst-style gaming experiences are built. Moving beyond traditional slot frameworks, he and his team are leveraging modern game architecture, real-time systems, and physics-driven design to create more dynamic and engaging formats.
By treating their products as video games first and wagering experiences second, Mirror Image Gaming is pushing the boundaries of interactivity in iGaming. In this interview, Jordie shares how this technical approach is redefining burst formats — and what it means for the future of the industry.
Jordie, from a technical standpoint, what architectural decisions enable you to move beyond traditional slot frameworks?
Jordie Wagner: We’ve deliberately moved away from thinking about our games as “slot games” and have adopted the mindset that we are making video games that just happen to involve wagering. That shift in mindset allows us to go back to the fundamentals of video game development. We then build our games from the ground up using modern gaming architecture.
We do not build on a traditional reel-based slot framework. Instead, our games use a modern game engine and follow many of the same design principles found in scalable gaming platforms. The core of our system is very event-driven, where gameplay systems communicate through events rather than rigid state machines. The physics and chaos in our games wouldn’t be possible without this framework. It would also be very difficult to implement in conventional slot engines.
We’ve also adopted a microservice approach for solving our math and simulations using our platform, The Fortune Engine. It’s a cloud-based service that generates and validates game math independently of the game client in real time. This allows us to run massive simulations and balance the game to our RTP. It also feeds validated outcomes back into the game pipeline in seconds.
The benefit of this is an extremely rapid development cycle. We are essentially simulating and solving the game math live during development. We often prototype and tweak the math hundreds of times before a game ever goes live. The result is a development stack that feels much closer to AAA game development combined with cloud-native services. This gives us the flexibility to design burst-style formats where gameplay itself becomes the core entertainment rather than simply spinning reels.
When developing proprietary mechanics like the Drop Mechanic, what are the most complex engineering trade-offs you encounter between innovation, mathematical integrity, and performance?
Jordie Wagner: Because our games are physics-driven, the underlying simulations required to validate the math can be extremely large. Early on, before we optimised many systems, simulations took a significant amount of time to compute. Retrieving results when a player placed a bet was also slow. That obviously isn’t acceptable for a real-time wagering environment.
To solve this, we invested heavily in optimising how we generate and deliver outcomes. We now precompute large simulation datasets, compress them, and stream the results efficiently to the game client. This allows us to maintain real-time performance while still supporting extremely complex gameplay systems behind the scenes. Another major challenge comes from making the math feel genuinely tied to the gameplay mechanics rather than feeling artificial or fake.
A good example of this is our Click Cloning Factory game. In that game, players can choose between seven different characters, each with their own math profile and volatility. The user is even given the stats for each character, such as speed, volatility, and power-up probability. When a bet is placed, all characters participate in a physics-style race-to-the-bottom mechanic.
The difficult part is ensuring those character differences feel authentic to the player. If one character is known for collecting more power-ups, that behaviour has to be consistent when the player selects that character. It also needs to remain consistent when that character appears in the simulation, even if the player chooses someone else. The system must behave in a way that feels fair, predictable, and internally consistent. This is true even though outcomes are driven by the underlying math model.
We spend a lot of time solving these kinds of challenges. There is a massive effort put into crafting player perception of game mechanics. This is one of the key differences between a gambling game and a traditional skill-based video game.
From a systems and UI perspective, what makes a game feel native to Millennial and Gen Z players?
Jordie Wagner: We think a big part of engaging younger audiences comes down to authenticity. Players today can tell very quickly when a game has been designed by committee with layers of corporate oversight. The games that resonate most tend to feel like they were built by people who genuinely enjoy making and playing games.
From a systems and UI perspective, we focus heavily on making our games instantly recognisable and easy to understand. Traditional slot mechanics can actually be quite confusing if you’ve never played them before. They’re also often associated with something our grandmas would play.
What we try to build instead are fresh, bold experiences that feel closer to flash style games we played growing up on MiniClip and our iPads. When someone sees one of our games, they should immediately understand what’s happening on screen and why it’s fun to interact with. Physics, characters, visual feedback, and clear UI are features that make gameplay intuitive. Players don’t need to understand traditional slot concepts like paylines or reel configurations.
Ultimately, our goal is to create games that people want to play because they’re genuinely entertaining, not just because they’re a gambling product.
As you scale burst formats across regulated markets, how do you ensure compliance-readiness without limiting experimentation at the product level?
Jordie Wagner: One of the key ways we approach this is by separating the gameplay layer from the underlying math and outcome generation.
All of our games ultimately resolve to a mathematically validated outcome generated by our platform, the Fortune Engine. That means regardless of how complex or chaotic the gameplay looks on screen, the final result is still deterministic and fully auditable from a regulatory perspective.
Because of that separation, we can experiment heavily at the gameplay and presentation layer without affecting the integrity of the math model underneath. Physics, characters, mechanics, and visual interactions can be as creative as we want, while the underlying probability models remain consistent and testable.
We also design our systems so that every outcome can be reproduced, logged, and audited, which is critical for certification in regulated markets. At the end of the day, the system resolves outcomes using pre-determined lookup tables, which are an industry-standard approach for ensuring fairness, reproducibility, and regulatory compliance.
AI and real-time analytics are influencing decision-making across iGaming. How do you see intelligent systems supporting gameplay design within alternative formats?
Jordie Wagner: We think AI will dramatically lower the barrier to entry for creating games. Historically, one of the biggest challenges in iGaming has been the complexity of building and validating the underlying math models. That has naturally limited innovation to studios with large teams and significant resources. What we are starting to see now is that AI tools in game development can dramatically accelerate many parts of the process, from prototyping mechanics to generating art, audio, and early gameplay concepts.
When you combine those tools with platforms like our Fortune Engine, which handles the mathematical modeling and simulation side of development, it opens the door for much smaller teams. These teams can then create viable gambling games.What that means in practice is that we’re likely going to see a wave of micro-studios entering the space. These smaller teams are often more willing to experiment and take creative risks compared to larger studios that have established product lines to protect.
Because of that, we think the industry is heading toward an explosion of new game formats and ideas, particularly in alternative categories like burst games. AI won’t replace game design, but it will make it much easier for creative teams to bring new concepts to market.
Following the release of Royal Drop earlier this year, what player behavior patterns or performance insights have meaningfully shaped your forward roadmap?
Jordie Wagner: One of the biggest insights from Royal Drop is that players engage much more deeply with games thoughtfully designed and polished. Like it exists inside a well-built world with its own identity and personality.
We’ve seen what it feels for players to interact with characters, environments, and mechanics that clearly belong to a larger world, they stay engaged for much longer. Because of that, a big part of our forward roadmap focuses on building games where the world and setting are just as important as the mechanics themselves.
Another important takeaway is that players can immediately recognise when a game has had a lot of care and effort put into it. In an industry that often prioritises volume, we strongly believe in quality over quantity.
So going forward, our focus is on creating fewer games, but making sure each one feels like a complete and well-crafted experience.
Looking ahead, do you believe the next wave of innovation in alternative formats will be driven more by structural gameplay mechanics or by presentation and thematic experimentation?
Jordie Wagner: Historically, the slot industry has really only been able to experiment with presentation and theme. The underlying mechanics were largely fixed — reels, paylines, and variations of the same core format. What’s different now is that alternative formats finally allow developers to experiment with gameplay mechanics themselves. That opens the door to a completely new level of creativity in the industry.
In many ways, I think we’re about to see something similar to the explosion of Flash games and early iPhone apps in the 2000s. Suddenly small teams were able to create entirely new styles of gameplay. It’s also comparable to the transition from 2D to 3D graphics in video games, where a new technological capability unlocked completely new design possibilities.
That said, while players might click on a game because it introduces a new mechanic, they tend to keep coming back because of the world, characters, and story that surround it. So I think the next wave of innovation will come from gameplay mechanics, but the games that truly succeed will still be the ones that create memorable worlds for players to spend time in.
With a background in digital media and a keen eye for emerging technologies, Ronaldo bridges the gap between players and platforms through clear, insightful reporting to the iGaming industry.
