Klondike game released

I developed a card game — again. This time I implemented Klondike solitaire as popularized by Windows solitaire. This time I focused on the so called Thoughtful solitaire where all cards are known. The game prototype is part of a bachelors thesis on Klondike solvability which remains a difficult problem to solve.

The project itself contains many visual tools to aid the solvability for human players. These are documented on the linked project page.

As a game development project a standard 52-card deck card game can be developed with little graphical assets. Yet a full implementation requires quite a lot of programming to fully implement and as such is a good challenge for a lone programmer. For this project the playing cards were purchased from Unity Asset Store to speed up development. All other aspects of rendering, inputs, buttons, UI were standard Unity building blocks.

The emphasis was on making the game as easy and fast to play as possible. This makes it faster to test all the different strategies and choice combinations on more difficult card configurations. In early testing 80% out of a sample of 50 games were solvable. The standalone Windows executable version comes with saving and loading too. The browser version can be played here.