So I started working on a simple game for my Blackberry Storm 2.  I went with a simple solitaire card game idea and screwed around and programmed it for about 1-2 days.  The game was simple, but ultimately I never really got it running/optimized to work well on my Blackberry.  This was the first blackberry program I had ever attempted, so I wasn’t really expecting much. After 1-2 days of trying to learn something new and being frustrated by the device and my feeble efforts, I quit and forgot about ‘Mobile Solitaire’ (pictured below).

My mobile solitaire game sat on my laptop for months while we experienced one of the worst blizzard seasons ever in the Philadelphia area.  There were several days that we were snowed into our house with our cat and dog.  We let my Jack Russel, Pepper, out into the snow (which was higher than her) and it hit me how cool dogs are and what a great market they would be to have a game for.  I didn’t really know of any games that centered around dogs and all the different breeds there are and thought it would make a great motif for a casual game and remembered my mobile solitaire prototype.

It didn’t take long to get my poorly running blackberry solitaire game resized and running fantastically on my PC.  After only a few weeks of work, I was sold on the concept and starting looking for an artist to spiffy up my terrible programmers art with some adorable dogs like Pepper.

Thus Best in Show Solitaire was born.  I had no idea when I was working on a little blackberry game that it would become a full fledged casual title, but it’s been progressing great and we recently announced it as our next game.  I guess the moral of the story is to not be afraid to try new things.  You may be wasting your time, but you may also create something that you come back to later on that may yield success.  Of course the other moral of the story is to always save your work since you may end up using it later on as well.  Dog Solitaire is getting closer and closer to beta and is looking great:

Only time will tell if the game ends up being a success and profitable, but I’m certainly hopeful and think that it’s already addictively fun to play.  You read more about the game’s progress and production (designing backgrounds, selecting an artist, etc.) on our game development blog.  Hopefully somebody will find a nugget of wisdom in my little story.

One of the really important things I decided early on was that I wanted to have good background variety.  All of my locations had to fit into the dog motif (i.e. parks, lawns, etc) but having level after level of dog parks wouldn’t be very interesting for the player.  So how could I add variety to the game?

To add some variety into the backgrounds, we came up with some different seasons.  In the winter, the fields and parks could be covered with snow and in the spring flowers could bloom on the grassy landscapes.  This was a great first step, but I still felt that it wouldn’t give the player enough variety.

In order to maximize the locations found in the game, I also introduced a time of day element to each background.  You can play at dusk/sunrise, during the day, or at night.  This allowed me to mix the green palette of the day levels with an orange look for dusk, and a cool blue look for night.  This was a great design decision because it not only introduced variety and more color, but also was cost effective and increased the number of unique backgrounds available in the game.

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1. The Sky – there’s a ton of weather and other factors  that make earth’s sky look different every day.  We kept it simpler in our game and offer a variety of skies ranging from clear sunny days to cloudy overcast days to moonlit nights.

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2.  Backdrop – the backdrop sits in front of the sky and is one of the more distinguishing parts of the background.  It usually contains set pieces to help identify and differentiate each location.

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3. Foreground-   Finally, there’s the foreground.  This is where you can change an empty grass field into a city street or flower filled knoll.  Don’t like the bushes in the picture above?  Remove them.  Don’t want the flowers, nix them.  All of these actions will give players variety.

Step 1: Sketch

While I was working on coding the gameplay and figuring out exactly what we needed for the User Interface, Jeff (our artist) started working on the backgrounds for all the different levels in the game.  I had brainstormed a lot of great locations and gave Jeff the list.  He started off by sketching out the basic layout of each location.

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Once I approved his basic sketch, he quickly developed a solid concept that we could start experimenting with in-game:

Above you can see our finished ‘city background.’  You can take your dog on a nice stroll through these city streets, but be sure to pickup after your dog.

We started here

From my sketch, Jeff turned around a pretty great initial HUD mockup:

I had a problem with some of Jeff’s color choices for the bone bar and we went through a few iterations of the Undo button.  Ultimately the items in the corner got a lot more space as well.

I liked the consistent leather look for the undo button, but felt that it was too big and the items were too crushed together.  We’re still not finished coding all the User Interface Items, but we have settled on the final placement of everything.  As it stands now, our user interface is still missing the Level Title stuff complete, but you will notice that the items are spaced out better and the undo button is substantially smaller:

As Jeff worked on the dogs and cards, I started working with him to think about the Player interface and the level backgrounds as well.  I took a current screenshot at the time (Feb 2010) and marked it up with elements that we needed for the player.

Ultimately, we worked on the backgrounds first and deviated from my original sketch.  We stayed pretty close to my mockup but I’m really glad that we moved the Player’s dog and uncluttered the top menus.  This was just the first step to getting the HUD and user interface completed…  more tomorrow.

Artist's original gameplay concept

I went to conceptart.org to find an artist to help me with this project.  It’s hard to find someone to work with, so I decided that I would pay a few artists to work on some concept sketches of their vision of the game.  I ultimately settled on Jeff Yoon since his responses were prompt and his sketches indicated that he had some sense of how the game would play.  He followed up with a much worse color concept:

This concept didn't do anything for me

What really won me over to Jeff was his cool painting-type style.

the Beagle won Jeff the job

Ultimately, spending a few hundred bucks for artist’s concepts and samples was a great way to test them out.  Jeff has been great thus far.

I went back to my mobile game and resized it to 800 x 600 to start working on a PC version of the game.  The mobile idea never took off because I didn’t have a motif to wrap the simple card game in….I’m not sure how I came up with using Dogs, but I did and loved it – so I found an artist and started fleshing out the game more.  This shot is actually after I found an artist since a final sketch of the Chihuahua is in the screenshot and a sole finished dachshund 2 of clubs is there too but that’s pretty much all I had.  You can see how sloppy it looks since I just resized everything and didn’t care that it was blurry and ugly.

So long time blog readers may remember some tests I was doing for a solitaire game on mobile devices.  I never really got the game working how I wanted on my Blackberry, but the game has continued to evolve.  Progress has been so good in fact that it will likely be our next full game for purchase.  It’s still too early to talk about all the features, but here’s the stuff that I can definitely confirm:

• The core solitaire gameplay is very similar to Fairway and Faerie Solitaire
• There will be 40 dogs to collect, train, and use – each will have different stats/abilities
• The game is being developed for Mac, Linux and PC (hopefully for a simultaneous release)
• A Level Editor / Hand Builder will be available
• There’s tons of background/foreground combinations
• My Dog Pepper will be in the game
• Squirrels will be pesky distractions for your dogs

You can check out the game’s website here: Best in Show Solitiare.com for some more information, but I’ll be blasting the blog with tons of screenshots that follow the game from the mobile solitaire concept to our current look:

As always, we love comments and feedback about our games in development. Feel free to let us know what you think.