First Devlog

I figured it was about time to start writing devlog's for this. I have made quite a bit of progress on the game already.

What started out as trying a new game engine just to keep my mind sharp turned into writing a game for my wife so she could play the version of Martha Solitaire that she remembered playing when we had a Commodore Amiga computer.

After nailing down some of the mechanics, I decided to tackle the data structure of the cards internally. This has resulted in a couple rounds of refactoring to fix things I already had working lol - oh well :)

So here we are. I plan on making the game available to the general public once I have something that is at least playable. Once Martha is playable the plan is to implement other solitaire games we enjoy.

Some features planned include:

• seed based hands/levels - all hands will be the same for everyone.
• global leader board - best 'score' will be time based initially. I do plan on tracking other stats, not sure which ones yet. # of undo's, # of times hand won/lost.
• notification if your top score was bested on the leader board.
• normal dealing/flip animations and extra dealing/flip animations.
• custom tableau, foundation, card face and card back designs.
• possible all random hand/level mode where people can share the hand/level seed and challenge each other.

I don't have large block of time to dedicate to this project at the moment, so I work in smaller 30 minute to 1-hour bursts.  It has been fairly effective; I feel like I am still sharp or have the ability to think when I am done instead of feeling totally wiped out.

When I do have the change to spend more time, I jump on it but make sure I dip out when the brain starts to feel overly mushy. If I can't solve a particular problem in an hour or so I usually take a different approach.

I have started using feature branches to make it easier to go back to a known good build to start over if needed. This has saved a ton of time.