Post by StephanRewind in Sweating the details comments

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Great read! Fascinating how deceptively simple the development of this kind of game can seem at first glance, and yet so much is going on under the hood; like a case study on Steve Jobs principles on good UI, which is invisible to the user.

Many valuable lessons, notably how sounds play into the theme, and your focus on effective use of screen estate.

And thanks for sharing your prefered font editing tool and the Argent pixel font. I developed a passion for pixel fonts since I discovered the work of Susan Kare on the Macintosh system. This will come in handy I’m sure.

gingerbeardman3 years ago (1 edit)

Thanks for the kind words! It is deceptive when you look at this game, or any game really. We could have taken a few shortcuts to do things the way they were done at the time of the Game Boy, NES, SNES but we really wanted to take advantage of the Playdate hardware. So we pushed to do more, making it more complicated in the process.

Argent font would have required licensing for app/game use, so we used the personal version for a while until we realised we couldn’t fit what we needed on screen. Would have been great to use it, and thankful we did not pay and then realise it was not right for us. Phew!

StephanRewind3 years ago

Yes I love that you’re looking at the Playdate as a legit modern gaming platform. I’m afraid to see it stuck in the 8-bit arcade clones and gimmick games . The flip side of the black and white screen and the form factor is that I’m not sure that it’s taken as seriously as it should. It deserves its own generation of future classics, like Civilization, Prince of Persia, or Lemmings were when they came out. And I’m not talking just graphics and sound but meaty content, long lasting value and polished game mechanics. Anyway, Sparrow Solitaire ticks all the right boxes to me :) I hope it will encourage others to push the envelope.

itch.io

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