Will Burrows of Crazy Tooth Studio: Where Original Ideas Meet High-Impact Slot Design

Will Burrows, Vice President of Design at Crazy Tooth Studio, works at a studio that has built its identity around bringing distinctive game concepts to life. Founded in 2011, Crazy Tooth Studio is a full-service game development studio focused on original ideas, innovative gameplay and high-quality production, with its INCISOR® platform supporting the development process from concept through delivery.

In this CasinoRank interview, Burrows takes us inside the creative thinking behind Crazy Tooth Studio’s games, from the development of signature mechanics and original concepts to the studio’s first major licensed-IP project, Dungeons & Dragons®: Reel Quest™. He also discusses how INCISOR® is changing the way the team builds games, the creative opportunities that come with working inside an established universe, and why pushing beyond familiar approaches remains central to the studio’s design philosophy.

For readers meeting CTS for the first time, how would you sum up what makes your studio different?

Will Burrows: Crazy Tooth Studio is fueled by the idea that exciting concepts deserve to be brought to life to the fullest extent possible, even if it takes relentless hard work and stepping into the unknown.

Fifteen years in, we’re still pushing ourselves to engage players by delivering exciting and surprising titles with the highest level of production value that we can muster.

I think this passion for pushing the envelope across all aspects of game development sets us apart – and hopefully shines through in our games!

Dungeons & Dragons®: Reel Quest™ officially launched on July 13, your first major licensed-IP title. What made D&D the right partner, and how did designing inside an established universe change your process versus building an original CTS concept?

Will Burrows: The opportunity to develop Dungeons & Dragons®: Reel Quest™ couldn’t have come together more perfectly. As huge fans of that world – and yes we have players and even Dungeon Masters among us – we had been working on a concept inspired by D&D rooted in the idea of choosing a hero and building up abilities to fight bigger and bigger foes. When we took this idea to our partners, Games Global, they had just secured the licensing for D&D so our idea became the real deal, sort of speak, very quickly.

Working with Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast to bring our D&D characters and realms to life was a true pleasure – and super fun! Developing the heroes, villains, and creating each campaign realm was certainly a bit different than generating an entirely fresh art package, but the imaginative spirit of D&D allowed for a lot of creativity, while doing our best to honor D&D fans – like ourselves! So aside from the sheer scale of the game, it wasn’t that much different for us.

From Big BuildUp® to Mega Climb™ and Coinverge™, CTS builds proprietary, named feature systems rather than skinning themes onto familiar templates. With recent releases like Fang & Fortune™ and Tower of Ra™, what’s the thinking behind investing in signature mechanics, and how do they shape a game from day one?

Will Burrows: Games concepts are developed by our whole team during these big, loud, wonderful brainstorm sessions with inspiration coming from anywhere. Sometimes it’s the game mechanic that sparks an idea, other times it’s a theme or even a follow up to one of our previous titles.

I will say that we rarely let an existing mechanic brand – such as MegaClimb™ or PrizeDuel™ – hinder that process but rather let the branded feature come later. Some games, with true persistence, fit nicely under the banner of BIG BuildUp® while others warrant adding a new brand to our Crazy Tooth Studio stable.

For instance Tower of Ra™ introduced the MegaClimb™ bonus and now we have Tower of Atlantis™ coming this September! Our brands are also a great way to tell our players that our game play is something special.

Cascade Cove™ revisits the Tumble Reels™-style gameplay of Bubble Beez™ in a pirate setting. What sparked the idea of bringing those elements together, and how did the Kraken become such a central part of the experience?

Will Burrows: We wanted to do a cascading game – revisiting our Tumble Reels™ style game play from Bubble Beez™ – and a pirate themed game… so why not do both? In true Crazy Tooth Studio fashion, that game is PACKED with high impact features and when one of the features involved transforming the entire game board, a kraken emerging from the deep just made sense.

Also, once we pursued the idea of a win multiplier that built up the more you cascade, we wanted to make it character driven as well – not unlike the Queen Bee in Bubble Beez™ – so the kraken became a constant presence, even changing color as you make it further into the Cascade Cove™! Cascade Cove™ is a wonderful title with a lot to discover and we hope players enjoy our take on a cascade experience along with the vibrant pirate world we created.

INCISOR® is described as your engine for making “the best content fast,” built on HTML5 and the Unity engine. For operators who aren’t developers, what does INCISOR actually let your team do that a traditional dev pipeline can’t?

Will Burrows: First of all, it should be cleared up that INCISOR® is NOT Unity. INCISOR® is an all-encompassing, first-of-its-kind web app development platform for designing and publishing extremely optimized, high production value web apps – that we use to make our games! It’s a super-powered and customizable visual editor paired with a huge code API that lets teams like ours develop everything it takes to make a game (or really any app) all in one place.

Art, Animation, Sound, Engineering, Math, Marketing, Publishing – everything in one place and built for exactly what we do. To put it another way, it takes care of all the technical stuff so we can focus more on how a vampire should move or how to make a symbol upgrade more satisfying.

Your portfolio reaches regulated markets through your long-standing distribution partnership with Games Global. How has that relationship shaped the way CTS builds and rolls out games?

Will Burrows: Games Global has been the perfect partner for us. Because of their global reach, market insights, and ability to promote and release games, we get to focus the majority of our energy on making great titles.

The trust between us allows us to do what we do best and just be excited about what we’ve done together and what we can do in the future. It feels like we’re constantly looking ahead to the next releases with excitement!

With D&D marking a first for the studio, does this open the door to more licensed partnerships, or will original CTS concepts always be the core of what you do?

Will Burrows: I think it’s safe to say that our original content will always be the core of what we do – but we certainly wouldn’t shy away from a happy challenge like D&D and we hope what we did with Dungeons & Dragons®: Reel Quest™ shows what our passion and care can do for a project like that!