Vapor Solitaire

While we were building Homestretch Bet, we wrote a little card module so that we could have nice deck management, card images, flipping animations, and so forth.

My "unit test" for this module was was a little app that played an animation of a klondike solitaire game getting dealt.

When I was working on it, I looked at a bunch of modern solitaire apps to see how they handled the animations, and what I found was that most modern solitaire games are engagement hacked to within an inch of their life.

Meta-progression systems, aggressive hinting systems that hurt the flow of play, ornate options management systems... it's all just a lot, and to me serve to undermine the beauty of solitaire: a relaxing game you can play to unwind.

So, we decided to put together the simplest, most relaxing version of solitaire we could. We call it Vapor Solitaire.

Check it out and tell us what you think!

How we got here

Vapor Solitaire is not the experiment we planned to release this week.

We're hard at work on a multiplayer game that shows a lot of promise. We started on it two weeks ago, and it hasn't quite converged into something we're ready to share. There were several reasons why things didn't progress quite how we hoped they would:

• We had a lot of legwork to do finalizing some very exciting investment news that we're announcing later this week - be on the lookout for that soon!
• We posted two new job listings, and the demand has been overwhelming - we had almost one thousand applications between our Principal Artist and our Part-Time Community Manager role. We're committed to evaluating every application, and we really appreciate all of the applications, but it's a huge queue to get through!
• After shipping the initial version of Homestretch Bet, we identified some limitations of the engine that were going to be pain points for ongoing development, so we decided to put some resources into shoring up some of our shared engine modules. We made a bunch of progress on it, but ran into a phenomenon called "integration hell" - plugging the independent systems stressed our code sharing systems a bunch and forced us to back up and get the engine right.

When we realized we were going to need a little more time to get our multiplayer prototype ready, we decided to pivot and leverage all the new tech we'd pulled together to take our little solitaire animation test and turn it into a real game, with a lot of love on the art and audio to make it a particularly relaxing rendition.

As of right now, all the assets for our games are stored unpacked and streamed in one-by-one. We'll need to fix this eventually - it adds a lot of unnecessary latency that could be eliminated by bundling the core assets into a single file - that's why you can sometimes get stuck on a black screen for a while the first time you load the page.

In the meantime, though, it means it's very easy to inspect the game's code. If you want to look under the hood for Vapor Solitaire, you can just navigate to:

https://vaporsolitaire.com/init.lua

It's only about 500 lines of code for the gameplay logic. Of course, that's the tip of the iceberg for the engine and modules that power it, and we're really happy with how those components are coming together to let us build new game experiences really quickly.

These modules will get a lot more exercise with our next release. We're still holding back some of the details so the release can be a fun surprise, but we like the name so much we want to go ahead and throw it out there so you can start imagining what kind of game experience it'll be. It's called:

Kaiju Defense Club