I'm excited to post the first Devlog for SokoSolitaire, I've never done this before, but I am looking forward to sharing the game's development journey with you and showing you what it is about before the full or even demo release. Let's get right into it!
Sokoban but it's cards
After finishing a fun casual game called Regency Solitaire, I was wondering what a mash-up of Sokoban and Solitaire would look like. I'll be honest, I definitely have a Sokoban obsession as I just keep thinking about how it could be combined with other games, funnily enough that's how SokoChess came to be.
I knew almost right away the goal would be to move cards to predetermined positions, emulating how you make tableaus in Solitaire. Of course, for the sake of the level design, I'd allow myself more freedom. You don't have to put in all the cards from King to Ace and furthermore the shape can differ or even bend compared to the original card game where it's always going from top to bottom, highest card to the lowest.
Bringing enough "cardness" to the game
Is that even a word? Anyway, that's the basic goal of each level established. However what kind of obstacles will the player have to navigate around and what actually makes the game worthy enough of being truly Solitaire inspired? I don't want it to just be dressed up as Solitaire, I want to carry elements of card games and Solitaire itself over.
Card stacking
This is a huge part of Solitaire, so I knew I have to carry it over. You can see the green coloured stacker on the previous screenshot. It works simply, but well. You stack cards on it from the lowest to the highest. So if you put a Queen on there, afterwards you can only put a King on top. When you move into it and it holds at least one card, it will push out the highest ranking card in your movement direction. If it's empty, you can move through it. Giving the player the ability to stack multiple cards like this makes for some fun puzzles and feels very unique. I'm not saying no Sokoban game ever did this, because I am sure some already did, but I myself did not see this implemented yet. Please leave a comment how little I know about Sokoban games and how many of them actually did this already, haha.
Flippers aka improved rotators from Sokobos
Rotating tiles in Sokobos were cool and mostly fun, but in some levels they could get a bit too tedious. Why? Because many blocks could be rotated in 90 degrees and sometimes you'd have to push a block back and fort on the rotator 3 times to get it the way you want it to be.
This is where flippers in SokoSolitaire come in. What kind of card-inspired game would it be if you couldn't flip cards, right? Well, the nice thing is that it's a binary thing, card is either flipped or not, so there's no need to flip it 3 times in a row. It's the same idea, but more elegant. Clarity is very important in puzzle games however, so even if you flip the card, you can still see what color and rank it is!
Card suits matter
At this point card suits and the color of each card was merely a matter of aesthetic, however I knew I wanted to implement a suit changing element to the game. So I added Suit changers, objects the player can walkthrough, but the moment a card is pushed onto one, it is consumed and changes the card's suit. It's not as simple as it sounds, you have to make sure you move the right card on it, meaning you have to make a path for it to get there.
And that's how SokoSolitaire got its basic identity. After making around 15 levels and letting a couple of people play them, I realized I have something worthy of becoming a full fledged game. Of course, there's even more puzzle elements than this, I'm undecided yet how many more I will reveal as I'd like to keep somethings secret for the full release.
Thanks for making it this far, next time I'll be talking about the art of the game and I'll show you what it looked like before Julieta jumped on board for the project!