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The game House Of Cards is a collection of solitaire card games, released under a General Public License, which I plan to expand over time with more solitaire card games.

Right now the game is only available for Windows, but as the game relies on SDL2, I think it should work with Wine and similar software on other OSes, (and if you think you can help me to port the underlying script engine, which has been entirely coded in C++,  to other platforms I'm all ears).

My motivation came up, due to me having the Microsoft Solitaire Collection, but getting more and more annoyed by the unskippable ads, which become more and more aggressive, almost getting to the point that you spend more time watching ads than that you are actually playing (unless you're willing to waste(!) money on a premium account). Since I knew I had the skills to create such a game myself, I eventually started this project, and now the alpha is ready. GPL3 licensed so the game is free (as in freedom) and the license does not allow anyone to deny you these freedoms, and no I have no interest at all to gain any money from this project. In the end I just had fun creating it.

The game has localization files to allow to play the game in English, Dutch, German and French (and I've also received an Italian localization by now). If you want to translate the game into a language I don't know, well, they are just plain text tiles containing nothing but variables and string values, so I guess anyone can figure out how they work.

The game has multiple decks of cards, and multiple backgrounds, and yes, if you want me to feature a deck you created in the game, then be my guest. (All custom decks require to be a series of PNG files in which the file name starts with the first letter of the suit name (so H for Hearts, C for Clubs, D for Diamonds and S for Spades) and the value of the card (in which Ace=1, Jack=11, Queen=12, King=13 and the numbered card just the number on the card WITHOUT leading zeros), with 2 jokers (Called "Joker1.png" and "Joker2.png" respectively), and with all that I can easily add your deck to the game. No problem).

As many solitaire games have some optional rules, the games have some own configurations you can set up, in order to play the game with either "official" rules or with optional rules (which can both make it easier or harder). 


What? You don't know how to play these solitaire games? No worries just go to this Rumble channel where you can find instruction videos I recorded myself, in which I explain the rules as clearly as I could (oh, don't get frightened, but I am a man, so don't let the sound of my voice surprise you. People easily make assumptions based on my avatar). I must note that there are videos in both the English and in the Dutch language on that channel, so check the language first before starting the video (all videos in Dutch have a Dutch flag in the thumbnail). 

Since the game has a free open source license the  source code is freely available on Github, which is also where my bug tracker is located. (Please note, that repository only contains the source of the script code, as the game itself is entirely written in Scyndi. If it's the C++ source code of the engine you're interested in, please go here, as that engine is a project on its own used for multiple games of mine).

One important notice.
The game is STILL ALPHA. Most of the features should work without any trouble, but bugs that can really mess things up may still be there. If you encounter any, please remain polite, hop over to my issue tracker, check if I already know about it or not and politely describe the bug in full detail for me, so I can try to replicate it and eventually fix it. 

I'm not specifically into horror, unfortunately, but I can still post you something else.
RPG: The Fairy Tale
Puzzle: Cynthia Johnson
Cards: House of Cards (Not yet fully completed, but already playable. It's still alpha, so bugs can still be expected).

Well, I've more games (particularly on the RPG genre), but let's give you these first.

House Of Cards 

(Note, the time was not yet scripted when I took this screenshot, hence it being 00).

-- And they don't all agree on what "adult content" is. --
And there you got a very good point. Since "adult content" is also a bit subjective.

And let's also be wary of false positives, as some words may imply "adult content" while in fact it's not. I've been banned on Twitter for 14 some years ago by a bot-moderator for using the word "trigger", as that was a death threat. (I was using that word in a completely different context, though).

Indeed, as soon as I see software packages of which the developers claim the impossible, I personally walk away as fast as I can.

Any time. Your deck has been put into the game under the name "Pixel".

House of Cards - https://phantasar-productions.itch.io/house-of-cards

Yeah, you too een fijne dag. 😉

Well, I was to understand this was your first attempt to create a game, and with in mind I must say I'm impressed. This is far better than my first games, I tell ya.
It also brings back memories of the good old days when games like these were really "beyond cool".

I see you focused most of all on the design and the code, as the assets are most of all 3rd party. That's no shame. At least all the assets are well-chosen, which already an achievement.

Now I guess those stars on the background are just a kind of tiled wallpaper. Well, it works. Personally I'd just use objects for the stars so I can make them move independently and also at different speeds. Somehow that can create a less static effect. 

This could be a nice game for me to kill some time.

House of Cards.

Well, I guess they work, eh?

Putting in your backgrounds will be done later. The cards themselves were my prime concern.

This does look interesting.
I will take a look to see if I can add these as an additional deck in my House Of Cards project. I see that the license you set up doesn't require me to ask permission, yet it only felt fair to let you know. 😉

House of Cards
(Note: No link available yet, but that will likely come soon)

Luna's Father

Well, a "floodgate" would be an overstatement, but quite often I do take note of what to do next. The base stories of my "Secrets of Dyrt" and "Star Story"  were written around the same time and for me it was just the choice which of the two to develop first. Now I must also say that some ideas I start on, but never finish. Well, I guess in that regard I'm not that much different from the professional industry where that happens a lot too. 

Of course, we may all suffer some times that we don't have any new ideas at all, and then picking up some ideas you already had noted before can be a nice option. My game "Luna's Father" which has being developed now already had a few notes when I was working on the two games I mentioned before. 

In the end we must always make choices what we do and what we don't and especially since game creation is quite time consuming, I guess that counts here even more.

And yeah when my game is in the final stage, it always bothers me. Then I'm really though with a project, but the number of bugs popping up seems to be infinite. And when I am already wanting to do something new, that's even more troublesome. This struck me especially between Star Story II and Luna's Father, as the latter has a complete new engine from scratch and therefore I needed more preparations before I could get onto the project itself. Oh well.

Personally I don't see why everything has to be 3D these days. Quite often 2D is good enough to do the job. Of course, it also depends on the kind of game you are making. For an FPS I'd always go for 3D. For an RPG I actually prefer 2D and when it comes to a point-and-click-adventure 3D does in most cases more harm than good. 

Now 2D is indeed easier to learn, both on the coding side as on the artistic side. 3D graphics can very easily turn things into a mess when not done right. That was for me a reason to stick to 2D (when I began we only had characters), not to mention that for the kind of games I like most it's also artistically the better choice anyway, so it was a win-win. 

Luna's Father

Thanks for fixing this so quickly. I'm right now in the middle of system maintenance. I hope I'll find some time to test the new version after the maintenance is done. 👍

Okay, I've tried to take a spin on this. The music and the graphics already invited me, however the game did somehow not want to register my keyboard, so all I could do was play around with the flashlight, but the character would not walk and also not interact with the ghost (which I think I was supposed to be doing).  I just have a regular QWERTY keyboard, in case that matters. 

Not yet, but I have downloaded it. 
I may have some time tonight, though.

Luna's Father

I already expected as such. When you have admin rights over a server like that you cannot always see what other users would see, and that can easily lead to things going wrong some times. I'll check it out later, as your game looks too interesting for me to ignore. And I might even give some feedback on what I think too. Just hang on with me. 😉

Google Drive requires me to request access in order to reach the download. 
Before I do, I wondered if that was a kind of scam blockout or did you only desire a limited number of testers or was it just that you didn't set the access options right?

Now reading the description this game is a kind of psychological horror, and also an interesting one. The screenshot does look very interesting also. 

Now I think it *is* something for the administrators to look into that multiple tags can be excluded.

Personally I don't think malware reports should be done on a public forum. The fear for malware has already caused people to do strange things based on false public reports based on false positives by anti-virus-software.
Yet a good thing it's cleared up with a Virus Total result. 

Those are pretty charming tracks you got there. I think for the locations I have not yet put in the game, I might even use some of them. 

Thank you for the encouragement.

I've downloaded your tracks and I will listen to them later.
It's now past midnight in my time zone, so happy new year.

I am always interested in free music/soundtracks to use in games, especially fantasy styled, since I am working on a fantasy style game as we speak.

Just like DarkBloodbane, I am wondering how to download them, though, as I too don't see any download links on the page. Perhaps you should check on your dashboard if you made your downloads public. 

I guess this will be the very last screenshot I post in this thread this year. 🤪

Luna's Father

Now this is a very nice concept. Brilliant in its simplicity, yet it can still offer a challenge to get a score as high as possible. The hand-swap feature was very nice and I guess I will have to see which hand is the best to use. 

Perhaps a few nice cosmetic enhancements can be if reaching the end of a maze gives you a short "level complete" notice (which the level itself still visible), and when you die it could be nice to see yourself explode or something before the screen goes black with the "You died" notice. 

Oh, and using music in the chiptune genre was also an excellent choice given the game's theme and presentation in general. 

I see you also have a downloadable version (I now only tried the web version), which is something I applaud, as it does allow me to play the game too when my internet is out. 

I love it!

Now if I remember correctly you can filter the search feature to show only free games, or did I remember that wrong?

A few general tips I can give, regardless if you go for low-level programming (C/C++ or Pascal or those kind of languages) or for high level (Game Maker/Godot/Unity etc) or even no code (Like Clickteam Fusion):

- Expect your first games to be crappy, but not as wasted. The only way to learn to do it is by doing it. So those crappy games are a very nice learning curve.

- Learn from "the masters", as there's no need to re-invent the wheel. Especially to how they organized the their game interface. Now those can be both examples to how to do it right and how to do it wrong, as interface organization is not an easy task and even the professionals often doing wrong (Microsoft in particular being known as a very big offender here). 

- Learn from the things you did wrong in a project. Even if those wrongs won't save your current project, it can help to do it right next time.

- Learn to tell criticism and downright bashing apart. "This game is crap" falls in the "bashing" category and is just useless. Ignore those, but if somebody writes you negative feedback but manages to come up with very valid points why the game is bad and even comes up with suggestions how to make it better always look at them well. Now one trapdoor is, of course, is that you must also realize if the feedback comes from people who understand what you were trying to accomplish, as that can also be a problem.

- Ignore people saying low-level coding is better than high level or even codeless. Use the language you think is best and we all have our different approach on matters. I simply use C++ myself as I like to be as much in full control as I can and this way I can set up my game engines precisely the way I want, but this approach does not work for everybody and for a beginner I would definitely not recommend this. In the end it's the result that counts as that is what the player need to have a good gaming experience. The language/tool/whatever you used to create it is less relevant.  The best programming language simply does not exist. It just comes down to the personal insights of the person using a language. Both low level as high level have their pros and their cons.

- There's no shame in using 3rd party assets or code, as long as you respect the original author's copyrights and terms under which they've released this stuff. There's much stuff out there even particularly released for this very purpose. Just be sure that the license allows it and of course that you are honest about it and don't take credit for what other people have done. Even if the stuff is released as public domain or as CC0 you should not take credit for such things.

"The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it". That is a quote from Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of the C programming language. And I couldn't agree more. One quote which I also agree with is from Brian Kernighan: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place, therefore if you write your code as cleverly as possible, you are, by default, not clever enough to debug it."  Now I don't want to scare you, but even with modern debugging tools that did not exist when the quote was originally uttered, I still agree with it. Finding the cause of bugs can be quite frustrating at times, and the trick is to find good ways to find out goes wrong. Adding a few extra lines of code to debug and removing them later is no shame, and cheating your game during development is also not a shame. Debugging would be impossible without it and when you play games only to test if they work it's not the game challenge you go for, but simply knowing if stuff works.

And with that I guess I've given my best advices. First pick the tool you think that might be the tool for you to create games and stick to it until you feel you mastered it. 

I guess this is a nice game to kill some time with. With the audio on the headset I can imagine myself playing this while in a doctor's waiting room or something like that.

The concept reminds me a bit of Jelle's Marble Runs, a YouTube channel were marble races are shown with real marbles and a very great narrator (Greg Woods). This is a nice virtual marble race. Now I hate playing for real money, but as this is virtual money, I guess it's all cool.

A nice game to give your mind some rest.

That is precisely one of the reasons why I left the place and was already considering that while I was still serving the place as a moderator. That and also the focus on the semi-professional commercial titles and less and less to the true indie game development the site started out as. 

It pleases me that itch did not make the same mistake so far. 

And yeah, I am familiar with financial issues, trying to deal with those myself. 
Well to update on myself, I'm still developing RPG games, released Star Story II recently and I am now working on Luna's Father which is part of the Phantasar series, and its story line takes place only a few years after the events of The Secrets of Dyrt, and I am still writing novels in the Dutch language about to release my latest book soon. A few weeks ago my upper teeth have been removed surgically and I have to wear dentures now, and that brings us up-to-date, I think.

Seeing one person I know from the good old times is definitely a pleasure. And I hope I have the time to play some other games you created. 

Still breathing.

Yeah, merry Christmas everybody.

When I click the page of the stolen edition, I get an error message , while the official link still gets me the game.
Am I correct to assume that the issue has been resolved this way?

A nice game concept, I must say. Pretty amazing you came up with completely configurable controls as this is a jam game after all. 

Now I may need to try this a few more times to get more the hang of thigs. I guess only the black boxes are the ones to shoot and the others I must let go? This also to understand the concept of "miss" well, a that seems to be the critical stat for success or failure, after all. 

Since I'm back on Windows now I guess your games (I see you are still using OpenBOR) now don't offer too much trouble anymore to start up.

By the way, it's been a long time since we spoke and since I am no longer active on Game Jolt I was wondering to see some of my old friends from there here. How've you been?