The Secret History of Bait!’s Solitaire
Intro by Tom Hall, article by Hugo
As a member of the Tinyverse team, our job is to create a fun social space adjacent to a game that facilitates interaction and play. We always try to make features that are fun both socially and by yourself, in case you’re waiting for others to join you. I really enjoy brainstorming and usually come up with a pile of ideas, invite the team to add their ideas, then we discuss and debate and choose the best ones.
This led to a very fun set of features in Bait’s Tinyverse called Caster’s Cove, including RC boat racing, skipping stones, floating in floaties, catch with a beach ball, a Hookshot arcade game, and lastly, as a suggestion by our CEO, Tommy Palm, we wanted to put solitaire into the game. The big idea was to get the code from our first title, Solitaire Jester, and port at least the solitaire logic into the game to save time. And to make it social, we decided it would be up on the wall of The Old Boot, the coconut water drink bar in Casters’ Cove.
So to tell the story of this feature’s journey, here’s our awesome programmer, Hugo. Take it awaaaaay, Hugo!
The solitaire game inside Bait!’s Casters’ Cove is based on Solitaire Jester (2015). This was a very early game in the history of VR and was designed to be a full and rich experience for the Samsung Gear VR and Meta Go. It was originally designed to be played just by looking at the cards you wanted to move since there was no other input. VR has greatly advanced in the past eight years and we now have many more features with more degrees of freedom and input that we can work with. The original game also featured a jester character that looked at the single player, that we needed to modify for a multiplayer space.
Early port of Solitaire Jester code plopped at the entrance of Casters’ Cove
The process of bringing Solitaire Jester to Casters’ Cove involved going through the original project and finding what we could bring to Bait!, what we needed to replace and what needed to be redesigned. The core logic of the game was ported almost with no changes as it was well written and the rules of solitaire haven’t changed over the years.
Putting it on the wall of The Old Boot
The main changes we made to the game were around the interaction with the cards since we now have access to hand controllers which have many inputs, tracking and haptic feedback features. We were able to make these changes with relative ease since the parts of the code that handled the logic and the parts that handled the input were well isolated. This is a great thing when working with code because it allows you to create new features quickly, work as a team and reduce creating bugs. Although sometimes bugs can be kind of hilarious!
Not the standard Solitaire setup!
Additionally, Casters’ Cove is a much richer and dynamic experience than the original world of Solitaire Jester, so there was a challenge in ensuring that the game ran smoothly and felt integrated into the world. Advancements in areas like GPU instancing allowed us to render the whole game very quickly and our team of UX and UI designers ensured that the experience felt part of the whole experience.
The Card-o-Matic in the Old Boot
However, there were some areas of design that we changed from the original Solitaire Jester. We added a quick restart feature so you don’t have to worry about being taken out of Casters’ Cove if you want to play another round. Additionally, we made the decision to not include the jester character as it didn’t feel part of the world design of Bait!
This experience was a very positive one and it showed there is a lot of value in using things from our existing catalog. Revitalizing this game enabled us to add more rich content for players based on something we knew was already successful. It also reinforced our company values of creating well written games and following best practices where we can.
The final “deal”
We hope you enjoy playing it!
