Free Online Solitaire

We are now publishing solitaire games at https://www.solitaire.io/ ! All of the games there are fully free with a clean experience. Enjoy!

July update

Hey guys.  Sorry for being absent most of this month.  A lot of serious real-life stuff's been going down and has been taking some time away from this project !  Not to worry, however, I still have my mind on it all the time, and give it some peeks and pokes whenever the opportunity strikes.

To hold everyone over for now, I thought I'd throw out some random screens, sketches, and ideas I've had over the last month or so.  Onward !

Unsorted concept sketches

Here's some stuff that I sketched up a few weeks ago.  Because of the spoiler risk, I'll forego the captions and let the pictures speak for themselves.  The style isn't a serious study but is meant to harken back to character designs of the late 1980s and early 1990s (as usual).  Enjoy :)

Video: Evolution of the HUD elements

Hello. This little post is basically to show off a few HUD elements, and hopefully I can expand upon it later. Making sure the player can access important stats quickly, with a single glance of the eye is very important when designing a HUD. Deciding which stats get prime real estate as permanent residents of the screen may seem straightforward, but believe it or not, there's even more limited space to place those elements than one would realize.  Furthermore, designing the elements to "pop" and be obvious to everyone is also a concern (and one which I can actually handle without having to hire an asset artist right away!).  So, for a little more insight (and a cute little video of our HUD in action), click onward....

Video: Hitboxes

More later....

The "Equip" Menu, pt. 1

As promised on our Twitter feed, some of the first real in-game menus are going to be shown in this article. I was hoping to finish more in the past couple days so that I could create a video out of it, but there wasn't really enough content to justify such a thing.  So instead, below the cut you'll get to see a whole bunch of early menu concept art, in addition to screenshots of the real thing.

Updates - March 9th

Hey guys, long time no see.  I just wanted to give everyone an update on what I've been working on the past couple weeks, for those of you who don't follow the Twitter feed.  For about a week, maybe a week and a half, I was working on a tool to create graphical fonts, which I was hoping I could use and re-use beyond FaeSaga.  That tool is publicly available here.

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I've also been experimenting with a pixel shader to create windows for the various menus we have to utilize in-game, which didn't work out quite as hot.  That code will probably need to be retooled.

Also, I made a little HSV color dialog to see if I could wrap my head around the math.  One of the things I always wanted to do when I was younger was to write a really nice drawing app -- That will probably have to wait until after this project gets published (and I get a few more releases under my belt), but still, it was good coding exercise.

Finally, I've put some work into some of the new critical tools in the tool chain.  This is the first screenshot of the Decorator.  It's pretty basic right now.  What it does is allows us to place sprites where we want on the map.  In the near future I  hope to be able to script certain parts of the scenery with this tool, specifically doors, stairs, and treasure chests.   I'm in the process of refactoring out old Events code from NBTE into this tool.  Speaking of NBTE...

Several important pieces of missing functionality have been added to NBTE, making it almost (but not quite) feature-complete.  What's been added was the ability to move and delete layers (requiring some array juggling internally), the Line, Ellipse, and Fill tools, full Movement Permissions mode, and limited Undo support.  Refactored out of the code was all Events handling.  The toolbox was also made resizeable, to accommodate for more tools in the future.  Preliminary Template support and Commandline support was also added, as well as the ability to associate (*.nbm) files from the shell. 

Moving forward, I will continue to work on the Decorator, as well as the Enemy Pattern Editor, which the decorator tool will serve as a code template for.  I don't plan on smoothing out the rough edges on the Decorator, as long as it will work in our big toolchain.  The reason for this is because I want to move onto finally getting some real map and sprite assets designed for the game.

Until next time...

Logo / Box Art concepts

You guys may have noticed the new header at the top of this blog. That's a bit of a prototype for the logo I'm hoping we'll be able to have commissioned for the game. I'm not that great at font metrics, but after several hours of tweaking and path-editing in Illustrator, I think I've got the vectors down to how I want it. All that's left would be to send it off to a pro to give it a nice paint-over so that it can be used in our promotional art, title screen, and etc.

And now for some fun stuff. Here are a few sketches I did starting from back in January coming up with the logo:

AutoTiles, pt. 1

Save for a bit of a graphics card issue I had yesterday, the past several days have been mostly about improving the coordinate system and putting features from the new collision system I demoed for you guys earlier back into the alpha. I've also been working on improving the map loader.

An interesting problem presented itself yesterday when beginning to implement AutoTiles into the alpha. I will explain after the cut.

Video: Ice

Collision Masking

Work continues on the alpha.  The built-in movement and collision routines with the main tool I'm using to develop FaeSaga in are a bit of a double-edged sword.  On one hand, it allows for rapid prototyping of what the game will sorta feel like when it is complete.  Collision detection can be powerful stuff, as it can handle per-pixel stuff automatically.  On the other hand, fine control of these routines often come with irritating caveats, or aren't available at all.  Therefore, I've spent most of today working on a replacement movement and collision routine for the main character.  (Video after the cut)

Game Mechanics and Compositing, pt. 1

So, I was plowing through some Lagoon yesterday (pic related), and playing through parts of it again reminded me of a couple of things that come to mind when I'm thinking through FaeSaga.

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