A couple of weeks ago, I saw a post from Tom Francis on twitter about a new solitaire card game design he was trying out. I quickly threw together a digital version of the game using some messy javascript, and had it basically working the next day. Not bad for a couple of hours work throwing it together. I posted a reply to share what I’d built and got some good responses - then things kind of snowballed.
Before long, I had various bits of feedback and some ideas of my own. I’d started pondering the possiblity of building a commercial version of the game when Tom updated his original post basically granting permission for exactly that.
With the green light, I decided to put my current game on hold and build a more robust and visually interesting version of the game. I mean, it couldn’t be that hard. Maybe a week or two, right? Hehe, well things have taken a little longer, but I’m actually not far off the mark.
I installed Unity, rather than using my own engine which isn’t really ready for such a drastically different game. I managed to get a basic prototype working in Unity within a two to three days - it’s a bit of a blur. From there, I’ve been refining and rebuilding functionality as needed and adding polish, things like menus, music sounds and working on graphical assets.
After a little under a weeks work (all after hours, due to day job), I actually got sick! Like a really bad cold or something. It completely knocked me out. I couldn’t really focus enough to do anything to progress the game. I needed to rest. This sickness took me a week to get over, and I’m still not 100% as I write this. It was pretty demotivating to be hit so hard. Normally I can work through a cold or something, but this time I just wasn’t up to the challenge.
Anyway, here I am finally getting back to work on the project. I’ve added one new mode and while working on the third mode I realise there’s still some more fundamental work I need to add to the game system. It’s something I knew I probably should have done a while ago. But I managed to get by without it, and on this project anything I can avoid putting hours into is a win. It basically amounts to a more robust turn tracking system, so that the game knows when a turn is complete before it starts the next turn. I previously was just handling this with basic control flow, no state machines or anything like that. It worked for simpler tasks, but detecting things like double-kills or if the draw deck is done adding cards was a bit tricky.
So, I’d guess I’m about a week from beta now, and I’ve started work on the Steam store page. Hopefully everything will be ready soon and can launch it before the end of the month.
Time will tell, of course.