Reading the screen

Journey badge and Start over - the badge names the system you are designing: Coins (things fly from symbols to pots), Win lines (a glowing head runs along a payline), Atmospheric (rain, snow, stars born in zones) or Flow (smoke, water, a portal streaming through a field you draw). You pick it on the start screen when the tool opens; Start over takes you back there. Nothing is lost until you pick again, and Back to the design returns you.

One system per session. To go from a coin flight to its rain backdrop, save the flight, press Start over, pick Atmospheric.

Launch Selected - fires only the coin you have selected. In Win lines mode this button is replaced by Play Lines. In the Atmospheric journey it is hidden and Launch All reads Trigger cycle; in the Flow journey it reads Trigger flow.

The fastest way to check one change: move the slider, then press this.

Launch All - colours any grey source points and fires every live one of them, one after another with the Launch interval between them, or on the same frame when All at once is ticked. How many sources are live is Source count on the Board tab.

With many coins and heavy trails this is where the preview can slow down. That is real information - the game will be slow too.

Randomize Paths - gives the curves a new random variation by changing the seed.

Press it a few times to see how much variety your settings produce. If every flight looks identical, your randomness is at 0.

Clear Board - removes the flights in the air and sets every source point back to grey.

Pause / Play - freezes the preview. Space does the same. Pausing with nothing in the air launches the selected coin, so you can step straight into a flight.

Speed - slows the preview down. 1x is real time.

0.2x to watch a spark being born, growing and fading. Most "why does it flicker" questions are answered here.

Scrub - drag to move the flights to a moment in time. It pauses playback while you drag. When the coins leave one after another (All at once off; in Win lines, Play one after another), it moves only the one on screen: the coin that has been in the air longest, or the one that landed last. The others hide until you press Play or launch again, and the readout names the one you hold, for example coin 3 of 15 · t 0.42. With All at once on, every coin moves together. In the Atmospheric and Flow journeys it moves the whole field. Values past 1 show what happens after the coin arrives.

To get to the next coin, keep pulling past the right end of the slider: a chain of small balls comes out, turns red and snaps, and you are at the start of the next coin. Past the left end you go to the coin before, at its end. One pull is one step; let go and pull again for the next.

Nothing Scrub hides is gone. Press Play and the launch carries on from the coin on screen; the save and the export never see it.

Show paths - draws the route lines and the handles that shape them. In Win lines mode it draws the green lines without a flight; in the Atmospheric journey it draws the zones on every tab, in the Flow journey the field's outline.

Turn it off before judging how the effect looks. The lines are surprisingly distracting.

Show pivots - marks the pivot of every flying item with a small crosshair, and each rim emitter point with a ring and a spoke in its colour. It works on every tab and starts off.

Tick it while you move a Pivot in a Transform group or place emitters on the Coin tab: you see the point on the item while it flies.

On a field of small items, rain or sparks, the marks can be bigger than the items. They are tool drawing only: never in a render, never in the export.

Isolate BG - previews on plain black and hides every stage element (the screenshot, the reel house, all of them) without changing your saved background colour or removing anything.

Turn it on when you are judging a glow. Colours lie on a busy background.

Loop - keeps re-randomising and re-launching for ever, so you can watch the effect while you tweak.

All at once - Launch All fires every coin on the same frame instead of one after another. The Launch interval is greyed out while it is on. Coins journey only: Win lines has its own Play dropdown on the Paths tab, and the atmospheric system has no Launch All.

Tick it to see how a big win feels when fifteen coins leave together, and how far the preview slows down when they do. Together with Source count on the Board tab you can try four or six at a time.

It is a launch setting, saved with your settings file but never exported; the game decides its own timing. The launch order still matters a little: it decides which coin is drawn on top where they overlap.

Random launch order - Launch All fires the sources in a shuffled order instead of column by column. With All at once on, the order only decides which coin draws on top.

Launch interval - the gap between launches in Launch All. In Win lines mode it is the gap between one line and the next. Greyed out while All at once is ticked, because there is no gap then.

Each mode keeps its own value and remembers it: coins start at 1250 ms, win lines at 100 ms. Switching modes never carries one over to the other.

In Coins the slider runs from 300 ms to 2 s (in Win lines from 0). For a shorter or longer gap, double-click the number and type it: 10 ms, 5000 ms, anything from 0 up (see typing a number).

Selected coin target - which pot colour the selected coin flies to. Switched off in Win lines mode.