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 Bally’s DM platform in March 2010. 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 Total Touch only worked on the IGT NEXGEN hardware with a display about the size of a dollar bill. Total Touch 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 and credits from their house accounts, and receive bonus credits while playing the games based on play.

Caesars Entertainment wanted to leverage the devlopment cost they had put into the existing Total Touch application and try to get it to work with the new Bally DM (Display Manager) video mixing technology. Bally DM used a different solution with hardware accelerated video mixing technology that broadcast multiple video inputs onto a single physical display screen broadcasting the game input onto a region of the screen and the Total Touch video input onto a different region of the screen. I was the senior flash developer at Caesars responsible for creating int a translator component mapping all existing messages for the existing system over to work on the Bally’s DM platform.

Part of my conversion effort was to identify and document the messaging sequences for all customer facing transactions used by Total Touch. I made several interactive flash flow charts that would walk through each transaction step by step with screen shots, and were a huge hit. 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.

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