Solitaire FRVR 2.0
After finally deciding to man up and take my own advice in November I have now spend ~58 hours reimplementing my Solitaire game using PixiJS for basic rendering. However the subsystems for retina support, game loading and asset resampling was ported from my own engine.
This makes it the 3rd time I have rewritten the game, but I truly believe it to be for the better. Maintaining my own engine was quickly becoming a huge time sink which is simply not in line with my goal of a $200 work hour.
At the same time as the rewrite I took the opportunity to fix some of the major issues, improve graphics and introduce a few new features. You can play the new and improved version 2.0 by clicking the image below.
For comparison the old 1.0 version can be played here.
Graphics
A important part of my strategy is a build once deploy everywhere. It takes a bit more work initially but really keeps the cost low when expand to many ecosystems. Version 2.0 has multiple improvements towards this goal.
Very visibly I reimplemented my asset resampler which now renders resized assets much crisper.
Per recommendation from my good friend, and longtime expert in making amazing games, John Vifian I increased the color saturation drastically and updated the cards with bigger/rearranged suit icons to work better on mobile.
The game now layouts the cards differently in widescreen mode, making the experience much better on phones when rotated sideways.
Vertical mode:
Horizontal mode:
Lastly but not least, I implemented a new display model that makes it easy to have containers with diffrent scale at the same time. This allows areas such as menus and overlay icons to have one scale, while the game itself changes dynamically with the current screen resolution.
All in all, the graphical changes makes the game look and work much better on a wide range of devices and screen resolutions.
New Features
- The game now allows you to restart the current game.
- The game now has an undo button, allowing you to undo your previous moves.
New components
- I wrote a new reusable left menu which I will be using in all my future games.
- I wrote a new FRVR preloader which I likewise will be using for all future games.
Performance
Lastly but not least, this rewrite was done using PixiJS vastly improving rendering performance on devices that support WebGL.