Some of the main features of Slot Designer
Supports all slot games, including
- Metamorphic and persistent state games such as those commonly known as Hold and Spin, Sticky Wild, Megaways, Shifting Reels, Cascading Reels, Snakes and Ladders, etc.
- Multilevel progressives including game and jackpot controller triggered.
- Very concise descriptions of incredibly complex games using a simple yet powerful text based language designed specifically for slots and slot mathematicians. Games such as Megaways in 60 lines of code, or Sticky Wild games in 250 lines of code.
- Unlimited flexibility to create your own new game features and mechanics.
- Powerful support for customer library creation.
- Many types of analysis, including theoretical calculations, full cycle simulations, Monte Carlo random simulations, session simulation, etc. Calculate return to player, multiline hit rate, standard deviation, skewness, kurtosis, confidence intervals, maximum wins, and more.
- Scatters, wilds, clusters, player choice, random wins, 243/720/1024 ways games, highest wins per pay line, free games, free games with multiples of the base game pay rules, 0 to 25+ reels, 1-200+ rows of symbols visible in the play window.
- Integration with custom math development tools.
Playable Prototypes
- Quickly make prototypes for mathematics development, artist visualization and sales demo’s. If you have the maths you automatically have a playable game.
- Publish prototypes as standalone executable’s that can be sent to other people.
- Simple drag/drop image files onto the prototype to configure the artwork (symbols, window background, etc), animations and audio.
- Win tunes dependent on win value or symbols under paylines.
- Different artwork and audio for feature game.
- Easy configuration of standard elements of games, including meters, reel positions, paylines, timing, animations.
Powerful game performance optimization tools
- Model player experience across many separate play sessions, and provides statistical analysis, replay selected sessions in play with a prototype.
- Reports statistics, including RTP, when playing game prototypes so that the play experience can be fully understood.
- Visually compare profiles of different games and see the effect of changes within the game.
- Exceptionally high speed and interactivity encourages experimentation.
Reporting
- Displays statistics in an easy to use format within the tools, with interactive data grids, and charts.
- Generates Microsoft Excel Reports.
- Generate text format reports.
- Easy to read XML reports for further mathematical analysis or configuration of gaming machine/server.
Integration with Other Applications
- Copy/paste game data from Microsoft Excel into the Slot Designer IDE, automatically formatting into the required format.
- Export of game statistics as Microsoft Excel spread sheets.
- Export of game statistics in XML format for easy integration with other programs, including custom math development tools.
Security of Intellectual Property
- As a Windows desktop application the customer retains full control over access to game IP.
What is Slot Designer?
Slot Designer is a collection of tools to aid in the design of Slot mathematics and games. It’s a Microsoft Windows application, running on a PC or Apple Mac under a virtual machine.
Central to Slot Designer is a Domain Specific Language that allows the game designer to work at a high level of abstraction, enabling games to be developed quickly, accurately, and with optimal performance.
The original Slot Designer was released in 2008 and implemented a relatively simple text based language and underlying mathematical model that was capable of greatly speeding up the development of the majority of games that were popular at the time.
The next generation of Slot Designer released in 2023 is a complete redesign of the language and underlying mathematical models to provide vastly increased capability. Based on decades of R&D and customer feedback from around the world, the new Slot Designer aims to make the design of even the most complex modern games quick and easy.
Slot Designer performs theoretical calculations similar in principle to those traditionally used in Microsoft Excel, only with far more powerful algorithms to get around Excel’s many limitations. Theoretical analysis is limited only by the complexity of the game and the computing resources required to calculate results.
Random simulation of games provides an alternative way of calculating results and collection of statistics, while instant prototyping and session simulation support the game designer in optimising game play.
A 6-reel game is shown to the right, with the play window varying randomly from 2 to 8 symbols high, per reel, per spin. Comprising 117649 individual games, Slot Designer provides a full theoretical analysis of this game in about 30 seconds. A playable prototype is created and played almost instantly, simply by pressing the play button.
This game is quite simple, and the code resembles that of the original Slot Designer, being a fairly straightforward description of the game rules. Many games are more complex and the new Slot Designer provides modern programming languages facilities for their efficient implementation.
The following code is part of a Hold and Spin game and dynamically creates pay rules based on the games reelstrips and hold symbol. It resembles C# or Java code, seamlessly blending the simple declarative language of the original Slot Designer with advanced objected oriented and imperative programming features. A key point here is that you cannot perform a theoretical analysis on a game written in C# or Java, you can only perform simulation. Conversely, you cannot simulate or play a game modelled in Microsoft Excel.
The video at the top of this page shows a collection of game prototypes implemented in the original Slot Designer – configuring the artwork for these games is not instant, but its not difficult and there’s no programming involved.
Slot Designer supports the customer creation of libraries of game features and functionality. This is a solved problem in modern software development, and Slot Designer brings these techniques into game math development.
In the following test game the player picks 2 out of 3 boxes (prizes). The first line imports an external library into the game to implement most of the functionality, with game providing only the final configuration. This particular library comprises 780 lines of Slot Designer code and is shared across many games.
