Slots used to be pretty simple. Three reels, a single pay line, either things lined up or they don’t.
Now, they do a lot more. Some players are curious how they get more complex scenarios accomplished while still having random outcomes:
There are games where “bubbles” appear on the screen and slowly drift to the top and disappear. If a certain symbol appears in that bubble, you win something.
Laura
How does the random number generator anticipate having a bubble on the screen 3, maybe 4, spins in advance? How can the machine take that consideration if it’s the microsecond you spin it knows how much winnings you will receive?
Fortunately for the game developers, it’s a bit simpler than the construct you’re suggesting here. Instead of anticipating anything, odds are calculated on two levels: The odds a bubble is on screen at all, and the odds a particular catalyst that awards that bubble lands on a reel space at a given time.
As such, it’s not known whether you’ll win that bubble until each spin is played out, and the bubble moves into place and the reels come to a stop. In a reels first approach, the outcome is established when you hit spin, and what is on the reels at that time is evaluated to determine what your payout will be. As we’re sure you’ve seen, bubbles can come and go without being awarded, just like slot spins can occur with no payouts.
Since a game needs to pay out a certain amount over time, some percentage of the payouts will be devoted to the bubbles. The odds of a bubble being on screen, and the odds of that symbol landing on the reels behind the bubble, are all part of the overall math to determine those payouts.
When game developers work on a game, they’ll determine how much of the overall payout is in the reels, the bonuses, any features, etc. The bubbles are a feature, and if they, say, put 10 percent of the payouts into those bubbles, then the work is done to determine what values can appear on the bubbles (since how much money you can win will be shown), the frequency of the bubbles, the frequency of those symbols paying the bubbles on the reels, etc.
The RNG is involved in determining when a bubble will appear, as that can be part of the outcome for that spin. But it doesn’t need to know that you’re going to be paid anything at that point, and that’s why 3-4 spins out is not really a concern. It simply comes down to the outcomes, and the overall odds of something happening being built into those outcomes, as you play.
If the bubble is there, and the reels stop where the bubble will be popped and awarded, that’s still determined at the moment you hit spin. So is the fact that a bubble will appear at all. And that’s how the RNG governs each of those halves of the outcome.
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