Firing Line Process

 So we've all accepted that nobody plays Solitaire online like it's supposed to be played. Ostensibly, Solitaire belongs to a family of single player games titled 'patience games', where the goal is to minimize moves and employ careful thought in order to successfully sort the deck according to the rules of the game. Most versions of Klondike solitaire that use points include penalties or limits for going through the deck with that purpose in mind. 

But do you actually play it like that? Chances are, no. Whenever someone boots up Windows Solitaire, careful, precise, play isn't the name of the game. Typically, players will rapid-fire click or drag around wildly until something happens, especially when the game has reached a stalemate that can only be fixed by reshuffling the tableaus. Typically, the faster the better.

That was the energy we wanted to bring into Firing Line. A timer was one of the first ideas proposed and it made playtesting fun and interesting, especially as it changed the rules of the game. Less emphasis was put on careful foundation-building, and more was put on dexterous card-stacking and organizing, making     quick decisions and balancing quickly working through the moves while keeping everything organized. It resembled cup-stacking or working through a Rubix cube on a timer than regular patience. 

The first version wasn't without flaws, of course. The original time-limit of seven minutes was far too limited, and it would be unlikely that someone would reach a winnable game barring extremely fortunate circumstances. Additionally, parts of Solitaire started to fall apart as the timer worked against the player; going through the deck one-by-one in a stockpile works well in a Patience game, especially as a way to measure how efficiently the player is making moves. In a game where the focus is on rapid move-making, it quickly becomes a burden. My partner remedied this by suggesting that the deck become the player's hand instead, allowing them access to every card. Additional help was given to the player by allowing them to use jokers as 'wild cards' that fit into any tableau, and allowing them to swap kings around if they made a mistake in starting a new tableau. The usual way of increasing the percentage of winnable Klondike Solitaire games is by making the position of every card in the deck known; this is usually done by allowing players to peek at the cards in the tableaus and play with the deck face-up. We chose different, more kinetic methods that would allow the player to spend less time fiddling around with cards and more time making rapid moves. 

I feel like this was a successful modification. We found an aspect of solitaire that we liked, focused on fine-tuning it by changing some rules and adding some new ones to make it the focus of the game, and that was a healthy process. In future development projects, I would like to focus on rapid prototyping more. Playtesting went smoothly, but we were carried by virtue of the game being fast to set up and play, with a strict timer. If I'm going to start developing less strictly timed games, I need to focus on making changes quickly; in this project, we added multiple rules at once and added and removed as necessary. If it was a game more complicated than Solitaire, this could've easily spiraled out of control. For future projects that are greater in scope, it'll be necessary to employ a more careful prototyping process, changing only one rule or value and playtesting once or twice in order to get a feel for the changes made. Otherwise, it may become difficult to parse exactly how different versions are changing the game.