CasinoRPG - Multi-sector online casino project

The start-up motivator Kickstarter.com is currently featuring an ambitious online casino project in which Goldfire developer boss James Simpson has brought together what he claims is an evolutionary combination of role-playing, social gaming and casino games on an instant-play, HTML5-based massively multiplayer platform.

Simpson is a twenty-something internet entrepreneur who started building games at age 13 and already has a successful online poker product – PokerRPG – out there.

Working from his Oklahoma City-based Goldfire studio, he is now at an advanced stage with CasinoRPG which carries a range of casino games that includes poker, and is looking for backers.

“The reason I started PokerRPG in 2006 was because I loved poker and I loved role-playing games but there was nowhere to play both at the same time,” he says on Kickstarter.

The poker product he built, PokerRPG, gave users a chance to play cards but also customise their poker player avatar by designing their own pad, chat with friends and invest in poker stocks. The game went on to develop a strong community with over 13 million hands and counting played.

CasinoRPG extends the concept and improves on it with new technology and features. Players start out as a janitor in a virtual casino but can eventually become the casino owner and even build a commercial empire by gambling their way to the top.

“As a casino owner, you can actually design and run your own casino, other people can visit your casino, and play your own games with others as well,” Simpson explains.

The young entrepreneur says he has played online poker at top venues like Pokerstars, Party Poker and Full Tilt and studied the structure from a player perspective.

“They all have solid pieces of software, but the common thread I’ve seen lacking has to do with communication. I almost never saw things like chat utilised by players at these sites.”

Learning from this, Simpson has ensured that punters have every opportunity for communication and personalisation at the tables.

“These are aspects that could still work well on real-money tables,” he said, pointing out that the US legal environment at present confines operators to offering free-play and prizes instead of real-money gambling.

Technically speaking, the front-end of CasinoRPG is Javascript, rendering the game on the HTML canvas element and talking to the server through WebSockets using the Isogenic Game Engine. Node.js is used on the back-end and a combination of MongoDB and Redis is deployed for data storage.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jsimpson/casinorpg