During my many years of working professionally with Chess game development, I have had several smaller side projects. Lately, I have had the chance to work professionally to develop recreational games like Sudoku and Solitaire. It’s been quite exciting as some of the mathematical challenges in these games are well-founded and more challenging to solve than anticipated.
What got me started with casual game development?
If you have been following my Mayothi website over the years, you’ll know that I have a strong passion for technical challenges, and the inner mechanics of game theory and puzzle-solving has always been something I found deeply interesting.
In early 2019 my aunt Liss from Denmark contacted me as she has been involved with playing & teaching many different variants of Solitaire games, and she wanted to know if it was possible to add some of these games to her website via some clean mathematic framework? Would it be possible to combine the inner mechanics of Mahjong and Solitaire to create a structured foundation for all the core data classes? The idea of having this baseline for a modular game development approach sparked my interest, and I started defining the framework which enables us to deploy new games at a faster pace than normal via global core areas of code. If you’re interested, you can test the first Klondike Solitaire (Danish pronunciation “7 Kabale“) I released for her website Liss. Since released several Solitaire games, I’m currently working on an advanced multiplayer version of the classic Ludo game.
Update: June 8th – 2021 – Added Mahjong game.
I just deployed a new free Mahjong game for Liss.dk as well, and it will be interesting to see how the Danish board game enthusiasts will receive this old Asian game. It is a real challenge to get the tiles and playing area to line up with the advanced game theory. When I started the project, my Mahjong knowledge was quite limited. Still, I have learned the basics now, and I even bought the physical game as I got so interested in it while studying the game mechanics of the online Mahjong variant. The game is in the Danish language as it’s been translated for this specific site, but if my international audience wants to play it, I think it can still be understood for testing purposes.
The future of game development for the masses?
Sine the COVID outbreak, the need for good recreational games has been booming. I feel the strongest commitment to improving the currently marketed games as there are many badly coded games out there. If you look at the running processes for some of the popular HTML5 based games and the dev tools in your browser, you’ll recognize how inefficient they’re structured and how memory-hungry these applications are.
I can’t be sure about the future of recreational games. Still, I’m sure we’ll have to reconsider some of the ways we are structuring the games at the moment as more and more people are getting on via their smartphones. In some countries, connectivity and infrastructure demand an intelligent approach to resources.