CAGD 170

 CAGD 170 homework section.

Process in creating the Solitaire Rule Sheets (Group 4)

Surprisingly, making the rule sheets themselves was the easiest part. In my opinion, trying to come up with an interesting idea was really difficult. The only way that our group came up with the idea was that my teammate just happened to have some dice near him.

So with the idea of dice, we decided that our mod would be to roll for the amount of cards you put into the seven tableau piles and the amount of cards you draw from the stockpile. The idea was pretty neat, mainly because it was so simple. After coming up with the idea, we went right to playtesting, as my teammate had already been playing solitaire (physically) for the past hour. He played and I recorded.

Here’s what we found out in the first playtest:

  • The game was a lot longer than usual (took one hour!)
  • Since he was getting a lot of high rolls, he ran through the stockpile really quickly and wasn’t really able to transfer the cards anywhere.
  • And most importantly, RNG can heavily screw you over.

We didn’t really make much of a change between the two versions, mainly because we really didn’t change much and I’d say what we had was pretty good. Really all we added onto the 2nd version of the rule sheet was the time limit of 15 minutes and the removal of the “roll dice to draw cards from the stockpile” mechanic. We took that out so it’d fit with the time limit. Funnily enough, the second time we playtested, my teammate finished the game really quickly because he kept getting good rolls.

Making the Pictures

I myself didn’t write up the rule sheet, but I did make the pictures that went along with it. I made both a setup and a gameplay picture, both in Photoshop. Here’s the setup one below.


And here's the gameplay images:

(VERSION 1)

(VERSION 2)


Luckily, the only thing different in our two versions was the game play, so there was no need to change the setup picture. Saved a lot of time, because putting it together was really tedious. I downloaded a pack of playing card sprites so I wouldn’t have to make them on my own. It also had some dice sprites in there, which saved even more work. All I had to do was arrange everything on the canvas.


In making the gameplay images, it was a little bit more annoying, because I had to make it look like a game that could actually happen. I picked the cards specifically so that a person trying to learn could already apply their skills to the example. I wanted them to think, “Ok, so the 2 of spades can go into the Foundation and the 10 of hearts can go over the Jack of clubs.”


I’m a person who loves the visual aspect of things, so I already had a view of what I wanted on it. One thing I worried about when I was making the image was if I was able to fit in all of the information on there. It has to be legible and understandable. I had to squish in the text. It wasn’t much of a problem with the setup, but definitely a problem with the gameplay. It took some brainpower to summarize how to put the cards into the foundation in one sentence.

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