At the moment there are two games that I really want to design at some point.

The first is broadly covered by “something like Solitaire”. Despite all of the wonders available on the iPhone, I have found I play Solebon Solitaire 99% of the time. I’ve been trying to work out why.

It’s endless, obviously, and randomly generated, so once the simple rules have been created I will never run out of games to play of it (I’m sure I will eventually play repeats, or hands that are close to repeats, but who would ever notice). For some reason I get no stress or annoyance out of losing at it, either.

I think that element is because I am pretty sure that many of the randomly generated hands aren’t possible to win. Which allows me to believe that any hand I lose at probably isn’t my fault. Even if it is.

The flip side is that I get a slightly reduced sense of accomplishment from winning. But it is not completely absent. I enjoy winning, but will usually (time allowing) not bask in the win, instead opting to play another hand immediately.

It allows me to tip the scales in my own favour. I can deal as many hands as I want, and only starts stat tracking my win or loss once I begin interacting with a hand. This lets me skip past starting layouts that look unfavourable.

I can also use the “undo move” feature as often as I would like, and it barely even mentions that I have done so (just a stat shows that it’s keeping track at all). It certainly doesn’t call me a cheater, or make me feel bad for doing it.

Very importantly there is no time limit on my moves. I hate puzzle games with time limits (I play puzzles to think, not test my speed of thought or reactions). While the game may track speed to offer a stat or scoring, it’s impossible to fail by taking too long over a move.

That’s not to say that the game will take a long time to complete though. I would estimate that, win or lose, most of my solitaire games are over within five minutes (the picture below shows this is an over-estimate by quite a chunk). That’s part of what makes it such a great fit for my time wasting. I can play one hand, or a dozen hands, depending on the amount of time I have to spare.

From a creation point of view, the game is a good fit for a very small team. Once the graphics for the cards and background are draw, some simple game flow screens created, and the basic rules and random generator programmed, the game is done.

There is no need for a team creating hundreds of unique level layouts. Or individual boss enemy graphics and attack patterns. Or writing an AI opponent who must understand the rules and strategies of the game to play against you.

There are other games like this already. Minesweeper is one that comes to mind. Perhaps there are others on the iPhone, that I just haven’t stumbled across yet.

But yes, one day I will make a game that will be my new “99% of iPhone play time” game.

And just so you realise how much I like solitaire – here are the stats from my iPhone. Actually from both of my iPhones as the backup kept the save file, so around one year and ten months of playing (if the backup had carried over from my iPod touch the numbers would be even bigger).

Still, that works out as an average of more than one hand a day, every single day, for almost two years. And a solid day and a half of continuous play.

And you can play it here.

I’ve decided to donate all of the revenue I make from this during September and October to charity. SO really you don’t have a good reason for not playing it, do you? Please also share the link around.

If you really enjoy the game, and would like to give a bit more than just whatever ad revenue share you play earned, you could sponsor my run here.

Look at some screenshots etc. here, if you must.

Gameplay complete? Maybe, there are a couple of suggestions for other things I might add since the gameplay is pretty minimalist (to the point of maybe even being too simple) right now. Some very quick scenery has been added (basically one object graphic per parallax layer, rather than having a few that are picked randomly). Also the full game loop is in there now with all the screens and text it needs.

I’d originally thought of using it as part of a competition for people who sponsor me, but a quick chat to the always excellently helpful Jas Purewal led me to believe that was going to be a lot of legal bother. So instead I think it will just get put on Kongregate, with all of my revenue going straight to the charity. I’ve included the Just Giving link for my run page as well, so hopefully it’ll encourage a bit of extra direct sponsorship.

Possibly launching tomorrow? That’ll be the quickest game development I’ve ever done, if so (tomorrow would make two full working days on this project, so around 16 hours).

Oh, and it has a name now as well!

I had the idea of making a quick little retro-style button masher to raise extra money for the Sick Kids Friend Foundation, themed around the 10k run that I’m doing at the start of next month.

So far it’s about 30% of the way there. Needs some front and end screens putting in, and then some scenery to look at while you’re running. But I don’t want to spend too much time on it – the idea is to get it made and on to Kongregate quickly, then any revenue I make off it in the following month will get donated to the charity.

Sounds fair?

Thankfully, this is a general rule that almost every game follows these days – developers have realised that the mobile market likes to get in to a game quickly. In-game tutorials are pretty common (though every now and again one goes too far in the opposite direction, and the tutorial stretches out to an annoying length).

The other day I downloaded Hexbee, since it looks like my kind of thing (I like grid-based puzzle games without time limits. I prefer them to have numbers involved, but you can’t have everything!)

It has no in-game instructions at all, so I was left to tap around. There’s a kind of fun to this. Tap stuff, see what happens. Tap the same stuff, see if the same stuff happens, work out what the rules are.

After building various clusters of flowers (I originally thought the game might be like the brilliant Hexic HD and require you to make flower shapes – what with it being called ‘bee’) I stumbled upon the realisation that you have to make straight lines of five tiles or more.

Now, this is a bit of a pain, since you can only move one tile at a time, and I believed you could only move them to adjacent tiles (since every time I have tried moving them elsewhere, the computer said no). Any time you make a move without creating a line three new tiles land on the board, gradually filling it up and making it more difficult to manoeuvre your pieces.

After looking at the leaderboard scores, I realised there must be more depth to this game – something I was missing. And there is. It turns out you can move tiles by any distance in a straight line, as long as there is no other piece between their start and destination.

Suddenly moving pieces across the board to fill in lines becomes much easier.

I’m still not particularly hooked on Hexbee, but it is at least a more playable game now. If I had friends (who were in to this kind of game) I might even possible recommend it, since it’s free (the game is monetised by the selling of graphic themes). But I’d make sure they knew what the rules were before they played it.

It’s been over a week since the last update* so I thought I should write something. But what? All of my time has been taken up with either work, training for my charity run, or playing Deux Ex: Human Revolution (which is utterly brilliant, and very likely to be my game of the year despite its flaws).

So, do I write about Deus Ex and how I would redesign the battery system, or the places that the XP rewards are lopsided and don’t mesh with the “play however you want” approach? I could do. Maybe later though. Instead I thought I’d share a screenshot with you, because why not?

I mentioned the other week that for the moment I’ve stopped working on the game with robots in a factory. This is what I’ve been working on instead…

You play as a police officer, flying around arresting various criminals and taking them back to space jail. Cops in Space isn’t the working name, but a Muppet Show gag for anyone old enough to chuckle along to.

Various criminals are tagged up at intervals, and you have to arrest them in a four step process: Disabling their vehicle so that it crashes; Stunning them when they make a run for it; Flying over them to collect them in a stasis bubble; Dropping them off at the police precinct.

It actually underwent some big changes yesterday, and has more coming today, because it feels far too slow. I am constantly flip flopping over whether the player should be able to kill or not (since they are a cop, and in this version of the future, that doesn’t mean executing criminals with extreme prejudice). With that in mind they have a “taser” style weapon that electrifies an area in front of their ship.

The problem is that flying along right behind a criminal to blast them isn’t actually any fun. So yesterday the taser became able to fire off, which has improved the situation.

I’m also wondering if four steps is too many – perhaps stasis bubbles should float back to jail themselves. But I kind of like the slightly lengthier process, and this is one of the things that will make the game stand apart as not “just another shooter”.

One of the big issues is also that there’s currently very little visual feedback. As I’ve been getting the gameplay working I haven’t bothered with things like particle effects to show that vehicles are heavily damaged, for example. Perhaps I’ll put those in today – sometimes these effects are just polish, but sometimes (as in this case) they are visual indicators that take the place of things like a health bar.

Anyway, no doubt there will be more screenshots soon.

* And apparently a replacement phone will be with me today – I’m sure you’ll all glad to hear.

So this morning my iPhone suddenly and unexpectedly shuffled off the mortal coil. Very frustrating, annoying, inconvenient, etc. Imagine being thrust back in to a world where you can’t check your email and twitter at any given moment? It’s literally like the dark ages again.

Anyway, during the support request one thing that stood out to me was that I have to wait for Apple to send me a box to ship my iPhone off in. This seems a little silly, and a bit of a waste of time. I have boxes. If they let me print out a shipping label, I’d send it away today, and my repaired gadget would be back in my hands sooner.

(Especially as I’m away for the next few days, and although it claims to offer the option of having the box delivered to an alternate address, trying to use that option will dump you without explanation on a “sorry, we’re unable to fulfil your request right now” page. Must be trying to combat all of that box fraud you always read about.)

Anyway anyway, I thought I’d send in a bit of support feedback about having a “print your own label” option. So I filled in an online feedback form. “Even though they probably don’t read them”, I thought. This reply I got shows how close to the truth I was (click for full size).

There really is nobody listening.

I’ve not had the promised automatic mail about my actual support request yet. I hope that’s not going to the same mailing list!