Max Lotto

The hard part was not the specification. It was that the specification had already been attempted and abandoned more than once, which meant the risk sat in delivery rather than in design. A lottery cannot be launched partially. Draws, stakes, settlement, payouts and the agent network all have to work on day one, or the licence is carrying an operation that cannot pay out. Every month without a platform was a month of licence and overhead against no revenue.

We started from the draw cycle and worked outwards, building the smallest thing that could legitimately run a lottery and then widening it, rather than building every module before proving any of them. The platform is a set of services rather than one application, so stakes, settlement and payouts could be hardened and tested independently of the parts that carry presentation. Raffle games and number games run through the same draw and settlement path despite behaving differently for the player, which is what keeps a growing game catalogue from becoming a growing codebase. The agent tier launched with the platform rather than after it, because an operator with no agents has no distribution.