High Above - developer's notes

I got the whole idea of making a slot machine when I saw a Christmas greeting on some website. The greeting was a slot machine. I liked the idea but I didn't start making my own version right away. Actually I forgot the idea for a while, until one day it came in to my mind...

At first I tried if I could make the core scripting done, in this game it was to make the three reels roll over and over again. I needed to get the reels to stop after a certain amount of rolls. Now all so far had been easy. I don't go too deep in the actual technique, but a long story short I made a movie clip with 8 different symbols on top of each other and moved it from bottom to top. My symbols looked like this:

(The list below describes the three reels with their symbols. Imagine the machine's three reel holes in the grey area)

Table 1: My initial reel symbol lay-out.

I had all reels in their own movie clips. Each frame in the movie clip moves all symbols up by one place. When the symbol 8 is visible at the very top, all symbols move to the starting point. This makes it look like it loops forever (remember Yugop's looping menu??). So this was simple, and I got it done in an hour.

Next step was to try it. I made one input field, so I could enterer in the number of rolls the first reel would make (other reels' rolling times were calculated from the first one's value). If I entered 3, then the first reel would move 3 steps up, revealing three symbols 4,5,6.

Then I made adjustments to make all the three reels roll, and make them stop one after another. At this point I realized I should have done the research. Let me explain it...

Let's take an example. I roll all three reels, and the first reel moves 3 steps, the second moves 6 steps and the third moves 7 steps, and then we have this kind of result:

Table 2: A result of a test run.

Now you may ask "What is wrong with this?". Well when you play a real slot machine you have different probabilities of appearance of certain combinations, in other words the lower paying symbols appear more often than the higher paying ones. In this state of my game, all combinations have the same probability.

So I was back in the square one, and started too look for information about the real world slot machines. After a while I run into a great site called The wizard of Odds. On that site I learned that there were more symbols on one reel, and more instances of same symbols as well. So the real reel symbol plan looked like this:

Table 3: How often each symbol occurs on each reel.

This chart is copied from the mentioned site.

So here you see where I was wrong. I had only one occurrence of each symbol on one reel and that would cause extremely low probabilities of any common winning combinations.

This chart is quite low paying too, and I thought of making the game easier, but I decided not to make any changes to the reels. I did make some adjustments to make it easier though. For example I made one of the symbols acceptable for a winning combination in the third reel, like this:

The symbol 5 in the third reel with any two other symbols wins. I also made an option to choose the winning line. This makes the game a bit easier (but don't forget that the initial bet is multiplied by the number of selected lines!).

Image 1: Selectable winning lines.

Need I say that research is important?

Graphics

After I got the symbols on the reels right, I started to do the graphics and add more functionality on the game. After a session or two I realized that the first part was done quite fast, I would spend most of the time doing the details both in graphics and in game options.

I did the graphics with a 3D program, to make it look less cartoon. I also animated the lever movement with the same program. The movement consists of 5 different images, no more needed to make the illusion.

The hardest part - I would say - was when I imported bitmaps to Flash. Now all who have been working with Flash knows that Flash doesn't handle bitmaps very well. Actually Flash's bitmap handling sucks. For example if you have a bitmap graphics and you mask some area of it. Then if you move anything below that graphic, (in this case I first masked the reel holes) the graphics "jumps" or twists in the exact areas where the movement takes place. And this is not what we want.

Then after trying a tip or two I got it right (I broke the graphics, which stopped the jumping).

Finishing the game

I wanted to make the game as smooth as possible, meaning the player is given as much information as possible. I chose to give instructions, the table of winning combinations, developer info, balance, bet, last win, biggest win, number of games played and the highest balance.

I chose the highest balance as the actual score. It shows how much money you have had during the game, the biggest win doesn't say if you're a lucky player. I gave the player a chance to save the highest balance with player's name. In the previous game projects I first asked for the player's name and saved all scores. Now while this may sound like a good idea, it's not a good one when the game is played 10 000's of times. So in this game the player makes the choice.

To keep the scoreboard as small as possible, I also limited the number of names on the list to 50; only 50 best scores would be listed. Also to keep the game from being too easy on the score part, I allowed the player to save the score only once during each game. This makes you think hard before saving your score, because on the very next roll you might win big bucks :-) .

I must admit that I'm not that interested in doing music (I'd want to but I don't have the equipment) so in every project I have difficulties in finding the music. This time I went to mp3.com in search of nice music. In an hour or so I found the music of Ryan Farish. I asked him if I could take a sample loop for my game, and we had an agreement. So the background music is by Ryan Farish, visit his website at www.ryanfarish.com.

I'd say this game wasn't that hard to make. Most time consuming was to make the game work logically, I mean when the reels are rolling you can't pull the lever, and if you have balance of one credit, you can't choose three lines etc. These are all easy tasks in real life, but in a virtual environment there has to be numerous checks of the game's state to make sure it works as it was planned to. I would say I got it right now.

I enjoy doing games, and I'm interested to know what others think of them. That's why I desided to make an option to comment the game. In this project I believe I have learned new things about game development. Not all yet clear to me though. It was fun making it, I hope it's fun playing it too.

Thanks for you interest. I'm interested in hearing what you might have to say about this project. All comments are very welcome.

- Juha-Pekka Huikuri

Made by Juha-Pekka Huikuri, www.huikuri.com. For more games, visit www.huikuri.com/games.