Here is something to know about me. I have almost no interest in gambling.
Sure, I get the same thrill as most people when you play a ‘press your luck game’ and it pays off, but going to a casino and plunking down a few bucks gives me no joy.
I have played some blackjack and a few VLT’s. I have bet on sports. I have played a few hands of poker. I have, and do, buy lottery tickets. I could also do none of these and not feel like I’m missing out.
I have absolutely zero interest in playing slot machines.
Since I am a lifelong video game player, not having any interest in a certain type of bright, noisy, machines that are designed to be attractive might seem odd to some people. We could get into what the difference is, but that might be a whole other topic.
Well, now I do have some interest in slot machines, but not in the way casino owners would want.
We recently went on a trip to Las Vegas. Weird, interesting, terrible place. I’m glad we went. I never want to go back.
Wouldn’t you guess it, but when we went to Vegas we saw a lot of slot machines. So, god damn many slot machines. I found them fascinating. Not because I wanted to play them, but because I wanted to know how they are made.
I have a pretty good working knowledge of how games get made. The technology and methods involved. I make graphics and write code. I know what it takes to get images on a screen. When I was looking at many of the slot machines, I could see some of the underlying techniques. Some of the flashy effects even looked pretty familiar.
I did several searches trying to figure out how they were made and what engine or frameworks are used on them. As you might expect, gambling industry people are pretty tight lipped about the development of their games. There aren’t really any ‘Game Developer’ style articles out there for slot machines. You likely won’t read a postmortem on the latest Vegas money maker.
So I did what anyone would do. I started looking at job listings.
I found, pretty quickly, that while some slot machines use proprietary engines or some form of html 5 framework, the overwhelming majority seem to be developed in Unity. I happen to know quite a lot about Unity. I recognized those visual effects, because they are standard features built into the engine. Particle effects and glow effects right out of ‘make your first game’ tutorials. Not that there is any problem with those, but they are fairly generic.
I did some more searching and found the small handful of companies that actually make the games. It also turns out that you can make an awful lot of money being a mathematician for the gambling industry. Much less so if you work as an artist or animator. I do suspect that they are probably working on ways to use AI generated images for slot machines right this very minute. Who cares what the art looks like. If you can get away with a bog standard particle effect some AI generated icons probably aren’t too far down the road.
I will probably keep looking into these things, in a very casual way. I don’t think I will play any of them. Still not that interesting.