A large virtual reel might have several hundred slots for symbols. Large virtual reels work better than small virtual reels. The low-value symbols occur most often and the high-value symbols occur least often. All that matters is that you distribute the symbols on the reel in such a fashion that some are found more often than others. What the game designers do is compose a group of virtual reels (arrays) that contain symbols (or codes for those symbols). A slot game has a certain number of symbols, usually in the 10-15 range, but a reel has to contain many more symbols. Today’s online slot machine games still follow the basic reel concept but they use what we computer scientists call vectors (sometimes also known as arrays) to represent the reels. Even the earliest slot machines used simple mathematics as a guide to choosing how big the reels needed to be and where to put the symbols on them. What makes a slot machine work in any circumstance is math. All Slot Machines Are Designed Around a Virtual Machine As long as you are playing a game designed by one of the reputable companies and served by one of the reputable casinos you’ll be fine no matter how many members of Congress Sheldon Adelson pulls out of his pocket to tell you about the evils of online gaming. The online gaming industry is regulated much like the land-based gaming industries in various countries, and there are independent auditing agencies that examine software and machines to ensure that regulations are being complied with. Of course, they don’t share the secret details of the deeper arts of slot game programming, either.īut there are a few pieces of the puzzle that I can help you put together. I have found a couple of credible people online who have some detailed technical knowledge of game design and programming principles. So the chances of someone coming forward and explaining how all these online slot machines work in accurate meticulous detail are, in my opinion, rather slim. The real programmers are locked into non-disclosure agreements and based on what I have learned about the online gaming software industry, it seems like many of them go from company to company or they co-found their own companies after a few years.

But as someone who has never programmed a slot machine game even my knowledge and insights are limited. As a computer programmer with forty years’ experience I find myself amused by many of the explanations, which are obviously written by people who have never coded any software in their lives. There are a lot of articles that purport to explain how online slot machines work.

How to program slot machines