Solitaire Plus

     I was a part of Group 1, we created a game we started to call Solitaire Plus because of the plus sign that is made by the cards on the tableau.

    The point of this game is to have a new version of Solitaire, something that was achieved by changing how the tableau was formed, instead of a row of cards we made a plus sign. We also made the goal of the game to create the Foundations for the suits, editing the rules so the cards could be shuffled around allowing for ease of play and preventing soft locking of the game.

    The target audience for this game is single players ages 14 and up, we tried to make sure that people with different learning styles were able to play the game. That there were enough diagrams to understand and support the rules for visual learners and making sure that the rules were clear enough for people who learn best through reading. The game appeals to the target audience by having a new and refreshing play area, and being able to keep the Stock and Waste piles separate via the use of the Foundations as a dividing wall.

    The biggest struggle we had while creating this game was trying to figure out how to change the base game of Solitaire enough to meet the class requirements and be totally original. This struggle meant that we couldn’t get started on the game until we conducted more research, stalling the game development. Upon conducting this research we found out that the main differences in the different versions of Solitaire were how the Tableau or game play area were set up. The way we decided to change the game is by looking at tarot card layouts, the one we picked was a layout called The Celtic Cross and we edited it to remove the overlapping card stacks. That handled the first way we made the game different and the most major way we made the game different. The other way we made the game different is by changing the end goal of the game, only having the player focus on creating the foundations, to keep the game from being constantly soft locked because our tableau is on the smaller side and has no empty spaces, is we removed the need to follow the red-black pattern or to make sure the numbers descend in sequential order. The goal is to complete and fill the foundations, not follow a specific pattern creation and then making the foundations.

    We tried to equally divide the work as much as possible, working around family obligations and the resources we had on hand which added some issues because it meant we couldn’t work together as much as we liked but we were still able to work together and form the whole concept of the game together.

    When it comes to solving problems of task management and gameplay we quickly discovered that communication was key. The sooner a question was asked and answered the sooner roadblocks can be avoided or overcome. By having an easily accessed and open line of communication via the app Discord it meant it was rather easy to reach each other outside of class hours and our meeting hours. We also were able to have multiple people playtest our game who were uninvolved with development, that allowed us to get an outsider’s perspective and edit and refine the rules and game’s design to make the game playable and easy to understand.

    I don’t necessarily know of anything I would change in our development process as we worked fairly well together, and would tend to respond to questions about the game that we had for each other fairly quickly, which meant that it was fairly rare for us to be stalled once we got into the swing of things.

Game in play: