Console Slot Machine written in C#

Question

This is my console simulation of the Slot Machine in C#. Please take a look at this code and point out possible ways of improvement.

using System;
using System.Linq;

namespace Casino
{
    class Program
    {
        public static void Main()
        {
            SlotMachine slotMachine = new SlotMachine();
            slotMachine.Play();
        }
    }
    class SlotMachine
    {
        private int _tapesCount = 3;
        private ConsoleColor _machineColor = ConsoleColor.Red; 
        
        public string[] Tapes { get; set; } = {"7", "J", "Q", "K", "A" } ;

        public void SetMachineColor(ConsoleColor color)
        {
            this._machineColor = color;
        }
        
        public string[] Play()
        {
            string[] result = new string[_tapesCount];
            
            Console.ForegroundColor = _machineColor;
            Console.Clear();
            
            Console.WriteLine(new string('-', _tapesCount+2));
            Console.WriteLine("|" + new string('7', _tapesCount) + "|");
            Console.WriteLine(new string('-', _tapesCount+2));
            var lastCursorPosition = Console.GetCursorPosition();
            
            Thread.Sleep(1000);
            
            for (int j = 0; j < _tapesCount; j++)
            {
                Random random = new Random();
                for (int i = 0; i < 50; i++)
                {
                    Console.SetCursorPosition(j+1, 1);
                    string currentTape = Tapes[random.Next(Tapes.Length)];
                    Console.Write(currentTape);
                    result[j] = currentTape;
                    Thread.Sleep(50);
                }
            }
            Console.SetCursorPosition(lastCursorPosition.Item1, lastCursorPosition.Item2);
            
            return result;
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

Here are my refactoring suggestions:

SetMachineColor vs constructor

• Depending on your use case it might make sense to set the _machineColor via the constructor rather via an extra setter method

public SlotMachine(ConsoleColor color = ConsoleColor.Red)
    => _machineColor = color;

• With this setup you could mark the _machineColor as readonly

private readonly ConsoleColor _machineColor;

_tapesCount

• As I can see this member never changes its value so it might make sense to mark it as const

private const int _tapesCount = 3;

Tapes

• I think should change the underlying data type from string to char since in each tape you want to represent just a single character

public char[] Tapes { get; set; } = { '7', 'J', 'Q', 'K', 'A' };

Initial Screen

• Your Play method has several responsibilities
  • It might make sense to extract some part of it into their own methods
• Let's start with the drawing of the initial screen

private void DrawInitialScreen()
{
    Console.ForegroundColor = _machineColor;
    Console.Clear();

    var border = new string('-', _tapesCount + 2);
    Console.WriteLine(border);
    Console.WriteLine("|" + new string('7', _tapesCount) + "|");
    Console.WriteLine(border);
}

• Since the top and bottom of the machine is the same you don't need to create two different strings for that

Spinning the tape

• The next part which could be easily extracted is the spinning of the tape

private char SpinTape(int tape)
{
    var random = new Random();
    var currentTape = new char();
    for (int spin = 0; spin < 50; spin++)
    {
        Console.SetCursorPosition(tape, 1);
        currentTape = Tapes[random.Next(Tapes.Length)];
        Console.Write(currentTape);
            
        Thread.Sleep(50);
    }
    return currentTape;
}

• Here I changed two things
  • Rather than updating the result array explicitly, this method returns the last character
  • I've renamed the loop's variable from i to spin to make it more meaningful

Put all these things together

public char[] Play()
{
    DrawInitialScreen();
    Thread.Sleep(1000);

    var (lastPosLeft, lastPosTop) = Console.GetCursorPosition();

    var result = new char[_tapesCount];
    for (int tape = 0; tape < _tapesCount; tape++)
        result[tape] = SpinTape(tape+1);

    Console.SetCursorPosition(lastPosLeft, lastPosTop);

    return result;
}

• Here I've used deconstruction to store the lastCursorPosition's Left and Top components into separate variables
  • If you don't want to do that you can still use lastCursorPosition.Left instead of lastCursorPosition.Item1 and lastCursorPosition.Top instead of lastCursorPosition.Item2
• I've changed here the result's data type from string to char to align with the Tapes
• I've renamed the loop's variable from j to tape to make it more meaningful
• If you want Play can return with a single string if call return result.ToString(); at the end of this method