Postmortem Unit 1

 

Group 3's Modded Solitaire

    The major modifications in our game is the implementation of a timer and the ability to stack cards of the same color. These changed make our game not only easier, but end significantly faster compared to the vanilla game.

    We have completed our final revision of our modified version of Solitaire. This third and final rendition has many changes, most of which were based off the reviews from the players. Though this update did not have the largest amount of changes, it did have the highest amount of "quality of life" and gameplay improvements.

The most notable and significant changes: 

-Complete revamp and further clarifications of the rules.

-The removal of a summary about why/how we made the game (was seen as unnecessary).

-The removal of a summary regarding our original game "TRES" (not relevant).

-The removal of all pictures (were seen as redundant and confused the players).

    These changes made the rule sheet significantly more easier to understand, and cut writing down by almost double the original amount. This in theory would lead to players being able to start and play the game much sooner, and hopefully having no room for confusion; has only the instructions/rules remain.

    Though the document itself is now lacking in aesthetics futures, primarily because all filler and pictures were removed, we decided to value simplicity more then having a fancy looking set of rules. The type of player our game is meant to attract can be divided into two primary categories: Those who enjoy the original Solitaire, but are short on time and want a faster game, and those who find the original Solitaire too difficult. This is because our game is not only easier, but significantly shorter in duration.

Original Problems

    From the very start of development, we were running into many issues on what should have been a very simple modification of an already successful game. The root cause of this was clearly the fact that neither my partner nor I had ever played solitaire. Furthermore, we misread the project's instructions and assumed that we could do a modification of any card game. Because of that error we modified UNO, and based our entire first rule sheet on the game we called "TRES". The was a relatively major issue, has once it was clarified that we had to work on Solitaire, we had to completely scrap all the work we had done up until that point.

    

    Development Issues

    Once we re-wrote our rule sheet from scratch, we hit more issues. Despite the fact that we know knew how to play the game, neither of us were experienced players. This was an issue as we had no ideas on how we could improve upon the base game while making it still enjoyable, as neither of us found Solitaire enjoyable in the first place. Because of that our first set of rules were made on the spot with little thought put into how it would actually play out in a real game. We thought adding a 15 second timer would speed up the gameplay making the games hopefully shorter, but also adding a sense of urgency to an otherwise peaceful and timid game. Alongside that, allowing the player to place any colored card on a stack would again make the game not only easier, but significantly faster.

   Development Process

    The play-testers seems to enjoy, or at least had no negative views, on our gameplay changes. So we never had to redo or modify those. What became evident rather fast was how over complex our rule sheet was for a game that only had two addition rules. Once we resolved that the game seemed complete. Going into future projects I would make a few changes in our development process. First and foremost, to read the assignments instructions very thoroughly. As this mistake cost us a whole week of development. The only other major thing I think we should have done was actually imagine playing our modified game itself. As we threw in rules depending on what we though other players would like, but never considered our own views.

    To conclude, though we hit save major bumps in our development process, we were quite happy in our end product. Which was pretty much an easier and faster iteration of Solitaire. The player testers enjoyed the game (except the rules, which have now been updated), and seem to like the idea that game was nowhere near as long as the original.