I won. And by that, I mean I was able to play through a complete game of Klondike Solitaire. The game has some rough edges, but it’s technically playable.

I don’t think that I’ve ever enjoyed winning a game of Solitaire more. However, the best part this week wasn’t playing through a whole game, it was the interesting oddities that happened along the way. For example, I was tweaking how the card draw mechanic worked, when this happened.

Silly things happen when you flip two members of an equation around, that’s right math. Not everything went poorly, of course, here are some of the new features that were completed this last week:

• Moving cards around with drag and drop
• Moving stacks of cards around with drag and drop
• Additional card animations such as: shifting cards in the draw pile when a card is removed, animating cards back to their original position when they were dropped on an invalid target.

I never really thought of all the little things that go into making a video game that appears as simple as Solitaire. Speaking of little things, here is a little something that happens when you forget to remove a card’s reference from their old location.

A much bigger undertaking happened in terms of development time, I had to move around and practically re-write all of the code. In the future, I’d like to add a few multiplayer variants to the game, and I had to re-think how I handle the game’s logic. It was a very time-consuming process, and more difficult to program, but will ultimately save me a lot of headaches down the road.

Over the next week or so, my focus will be on features required for an MVP (minimum viable product). Specifically, I will be working on rounding out the mouse inputs, a game timer, displaying a score and a simple user interface. My goal by the end of next week is to be able to have a no-frills alpha ready for testing.

If you, or someone you know is interesting in testing my game, please shoot me a message.