We're happy to announce that SokoSolitaire is part of the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase this year! To celebrate this special occasion, we are putting the game on a 20% discount! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2318680/SokoSolitaire/

Some of our other games are also part of the event as well.

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/33759/SokoChess_Collection/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1783800/Crossroad_OS/

[ 2024-05-24 13:42:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello everyone, just released a quick hotfix updating the game to version 1.0.6! Fixed the following issues

• If a lock was above a paw, it was possible to move through sometimes. This is relevant for example for level 39.

Many thanks for the bug reports and apologies for any inconveniences this may have caused. If you happen to run into more issues, please report them in Steam forums or in our discord server and I will look into them as soon as possible! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2318680/SokoSolitaire/

[ 2023-08-14 08:50:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello everyone, just released a quick hotfix updating the game to version 1.05! Fixed the following issues

• An issue with higher fps (90 or 120) where the game logic and undo logic wouldn't behave correctly. Eg: when undoing card flipping, the card would be undone to a wrong state.
• Pause menu issue, where pressing escape key would at close it and bring it up again at the before mentioned higher fps.

Many thanks for the bug reports and apologies for any inconveniences this may have caused. If you happen to run into more issues, please report them in Steam forums or in our discord server and I will look into them as soon as possible! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2318680/SokoSolitaire/

[ 2023-08-13 09:49:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello everyone, just released a quick hotfix updating the game to version 1.0.4! Fixed the following issue

• A bug that would cause the card win animation to stay on the screen even after it is over and you are in the next level. The animation would stay on screen until you'd go to main menu.

Many thanks for the bug reports and apologies for any inconveniences this may have caused. If you happen to run into more issues, please report them in Steam forums or in our discord server and I will look into them as soon as possible! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2318680/SokoSolitaire/

[ 2023-08-10 06:18:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello everyone, just released a quick hotfix updating the game to version 1.0.3! Fixed the following issue

• Rare save file issue where your game progress wouldn't be saved if you quit the game without entering the next level
• Being able to go out of the page range in the leaderboards. Eg: If a level has 20 pages, you could go to page 21 or even -1 which would break the leaderboards menu and you'd have to restart the game to fix it.

Many thanks for the bug reports and apologies for any inconveniences this may have caused. If you happen to run into more issues, please report them in Steam forums or in our discord server and I will look into them as soon as possible! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2318680/SokoSolitaire/

[ 2023-08-07 09:16:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello everyone, just released a quick hotfix updating the game to version 1.0.2! Fixed the following issue

• Issue where the achievement for beating all levels wouldn't unlock. If you ran into this and do not own the achievement, beat ANY level (recommended level 1 as it's the fastest) to unlock the achievement.

Many thanks for the bug reports and apologies for any inconveniences this may have caused. If you happen to run into more issues, please report them in Steam forums or in our discord server and I will look into them as soon as possible! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2318680/SokoSolitaire/

[ 2023-08-04 18:18:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello everyone, just released a quick hotfix updating the game to version 1.0.1! Fixed the following issues

• Leaderboards crash when going to another page
• Leaderboards menu not behaving correctly when exiting the level screen
• Steam achievements not being achieved in-game when you get earn them, but instead on the next start up of the game

Many thanks for the bug reports and apologies for any inconveniences this may have caused. If you happen to run into more issues, please report them in Steam forums or in our discord server and I will look into them as soon as possible! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2318680/SokoSolitaire/

[ 2023-08-03 20:28:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello everyone, we're excited to announce that SokoSolitaire is finally here! The game is on a 10% discount during its launch week. We can't wait to hear what you have to say about the game and read your reviews. Thanks for checking our game out!

Save 10% during the launch week!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2318680/SokoSolitaire/

Bundles

We also decided to bundle up SokoSolitaire with other games. If you'd like to play more puzzle games, check the bundles below! https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/33773/Cerebral_Puzzle_Debuts/ https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/33556/Cats_and_Sokoban/

[ 2023-08-03 16:36:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello everyone, SokoSolitaire will releasing on August 3rd as a debut title in the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase! To celebrate this occasion, I, Martin, the lead developer, will be streaming SokoSolitaire for an hour. Come join the chat and ask me anything you'd like about the game! The livestream will be on August 4th, 18:00 - 19:00 GMT + 2 See you there! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2318680/SokoSolitaire/

[ 2023-07-31 14:26:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello everyone, SokoSolitaire's release is closer than ever and we've been listening to your feedback. The demo is still up and we'll be listening to what you have to say even after release, however there are some changes we will be including in the full version that we believe are worth mentioning.

Undo can be held

In the demo version you can only press the undo button, which can get bothersome when undoing many moves. We changed this and in the full version you can just hold the button down.

Card stacking tutorial

Some had a hard time understanding how the card stacking works exactly, so in the full game you can expect a tutorial explanation that will make this clearer.

Colorblind support

We were informed some people had issues telling the color of cards apart due to being colorblind. We added 3 different colorblind modes to the full version. These are Trichromatic, Dichromatic and Monochromatic modes. You can see an example below!
Thank you for all feedback you provided so far, we are happy we can make the game even better before it comes out. If there's anything else you think we should know, please let us know in the comments. We're looking forward to the release on July 28th! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2318680/SokoSolitaire/

[ 2023-07-11 00:19:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

Watch Martin Firbacher, the lead developer of SokoSolitaire, play through the game and ask him anything you'd like to know!

Stream schedule

June 20th - 2:00 till 3:00 PM CEST June 20th - 7:00 till 8:00 PM CEST https://store.steampowered.com/app/2318680/SokoSolitaire/

[ 2023-06-16 08:34:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

Watch Martin Firbacher, the lead developer of SokoSolitaire, play through the game and ask him anything you'd like to know!

Stream schedule

June 20th - 2:00 till 3:00 PM CEST June 20th - 7:00 till 8:00 PM CEST https://store.steampowered.com/app/2318680/SokoSolitaire/

[ 2023-06-16 08:33:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

Today's devlog was supposed to be about coding and how I approach it, but due to the battle I had with audio design in SokoSolitaire, the plan has changed! You know, I usually enjoy working on audio. Sure, I can't listen to music or podcasts in the background as I need to hear everything well, but it can be fun to search for sounds and then play with them in editing. I often get praise for the audio in my games, especially in my newer titles. Personally I think Dark Crypt and Sokobos have the best audio of them all. The sounds greatly relay what they need do and they sound satisfying or as the fancy folk say - cathartic.
I never struggled with sound as much as I did in SokoSolitaire before. If you look at the screenshot, what do you see? Cards and card related stuff! An arrow that flips the cards, field that allows you to stack cards and last but not least a suit changer that will (surprisingly!) change the suit and color of any card that is pushed onto it and last but not least, cards. SokoSolitaire needs a lot of card or card-like sounding sounds, but they also need to be distinct enough from one to another so you clearly know what each sound represents. For context, Sokobos has some really good, crunchy and satisfying sounds, but it took me only 2 days to find them all and then adjust them for my needs. See, not only there are a lot of good free recordings out there of rocks falling, sliding, and so on, they also sound good before I even edit them. In SokoSolitaire's case it took me 5 days to be satisfied with how things sound, so what went wrong and why was the audio journey filled with pain and despair? Honestly, just finding good enough sounds that can be improved by editing proved to be very challenging. There aren't as many sounds out there for cards and some just aren't what I need, others have horrible quality or way too much background noise. Often removing the background noise meant parts of the sound would be removed as well, ruining the sound as a whole. Another issue is that sometimes sounds can sound great on their own, but when you put them in the game, you realize they just don't fit. On day 2 of audio work, I finally became somewhat satisfied with the sounds in SokoSolitaire, only to realize the next day that most of them are bad. Audio is very important for games, so I decided to remove them, which meant I had to start pretty much from a scratch after 2 days of hard work. I even went through some asset packs that suffered the same quality problems as mentioned before, but some of them were from 2012 and I assume back then everyone just had lower standards. My game development motto is that you have to pick your battles and sometimes you just have to settle for good enough, however your good enough has to be great in case of audio, because sound are just so important. It's one of the first things you will notice upon launching a game as you get to hear sounds before usually even getting to the gameplay. For example the sounds you will hear in menus when you hover or click buttons. Another thing worth mentioning is that sounds being good and fitting is not enough in itself though because you will hear some sounds hundreds if not thousands of times while playing the game, so you also have to make sure they don't sound annoying after hearing them for an extended period of time. Last but not least, sounds (and music too) really just bring the whole game together. Audio plays a huge part of giving player feedback. Seeing your character move is not enough, you need to hear it and the sound needs to sound good. For me, audio design is a lot about gut feeling and trial and error. I don't have a trick how I decide what sound is good or bad, I just listen to it, put in game, see how it feels there and then adjust it until it sounds great. Overall, I am very happy with how the game sounds right now even though the journey to get there was a torturous one. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2318680/SokoSolitaire/

[ 2023-05-26 11:42:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

When it comes to making games my most favorite part is creating the actual content you play which in this case means making the levels. In this devlog I'll walk you through my 3 methods I use to make levels, although in case of SokoSolitaire I only used 2 of them, more on that later.

1) Teach the player

When I sit down to make a level, the first thing I do is ask myself what I want to accomplish with it. In case of these levels, it's to teach the player a basic rule or interaction of rules. Let's start with the most simple example, the very first level of SokoSolitaire.
A piece of advice I heard somewhere, sometime ago I really like goes along the lines of "Assume your game is the player's first videogame they have ever played.", no matter what the player does here, they cannot get stuck. They will always be able to solve the level. The player just has to go right, then move up which will also push the card to its destination eventually. Even if the player doesn't figure out what the transparent outline of the card is just by looking at it, once the card is pushed there and the level finishes, it will become clear to them. The more games I make, the more I enjoy the idea of letting player figure things out, rather than telling them. In Sokobos there's a tutorial window pop-up at first level that tells you how to move and what you need to do to solve the level.
Many people told me they didn't read it and just closed it. Then they figured out how to control and play the game anyway. Turns out a see-through outline of a statue and 4 pieces of the said statue are pretty self explanatory. Although you can actually fail in this level as you can push the parts in a way the level becomes unsolvable and then you have to undo a few steps or restart.
In SokoChess and SokoChess White I wanted the tutorial to be less intrusive, so I figured I'd just show the text on the side of the screen, highlight important words and let people read it, if they want to. As you can see, I still explain what the goal of the level is, even though again, just by looking at it you can very easily figure it out, not to mention there is no way you can get stuck in this level.
Most tutorial levels are easy to make. They are very straightforward and short, since limiting the movement space is how you can easily direct the player towards what you want them to do. Funnily enough level 6 was the hardest and longest tutorial level to make for SokoSolitaire due to the card stacking mechanic. It just took a while to get it where I really liked it. Quick refresher in case you forgot, the green field allows you to stack cards on top of each other. It goes from the lower rank to higher, so if you push a Queen there, only a King can go on top of it. I wanted to make sure this is something the player really understands. This is why the player starts above the Queen and the only way to progress through the level is to push the Queen down, this also stacks it so it shows the player the interaction. On top of that it demonstrates the green field does not block cards. In order to push a card out, you move into it and the highest ranking card, in this case the King, comes out.
After the first move the player has a bit of a freedom, but it won't take too long until they figure out what to do next. The King is next to the Queen and the path to move to it, is open. In case the player tries to do something else, they will quickly realize that is not the correct thing to do. If they push the Queen down further, they can't push out the King. If they push the Queen to its destination, the King cannot be pushed to its anymore.

2) First there was an idea, then there was a level

What I always want to avoid is making a filler level, which to me is a level that brings nothing new to the table. One could say these levels still teach you something, but I like to think of it as letting a player figure out a puzzle that requires them to do something before unseen that they can now realize how to do based on what they were previously shown and taught. It makes for a great "A-ha!" moment which to me is what makes a puzzle memorable and often great.
At first sight it may appear this level is just what the tutorials taught the player previously. You have to move the cards to their destination and there is a single card stacker, however there's much more going on. Firstly, most of the cards are placed in a very inconvenient way. The cards destination create an unusual shape, it's not a horizontal or vertical line, it's a mix of both. Furthermore once you put a King in its place, the level's top area will not be traversable anymore. You have to figure in what order you need to push the cards to their destination, while joggling the cards around so you can access the card you need to move next. I'm making the player do something they either haven't done before or like in this case, they have done some parts of it before but in an isolated manner. So before this level, there are levels where the player must juggle the cards around, so they can get the correct card out first. However in level 10, they must do multiple of these things at once. Making a level like this always starts with an idea for a unique interaction or a combination of interactions. Then I sit down, I make the level layout and start placing the things down in Godot, of course it doesn't always go smoothly. Sometimes I figure out the idea in my head doesn't actually work, because there isn't enough space, so I have to adjust that. Afterwards I may find out there is a much more simple solution due to the previous changes which means the player doesn't need to do the new, interesting thing I want them to do, so I change it again. As you can see, there's often a lot of trial and error involved as well in this process. As I mentioned before, all levels in SokoSolitaire are made using this and the previous tutorial method. Therefore you might wonder how I get enough ideas to make 60 whopping levels, or in case of the SokoChess games 70 per each game. Well, when you have as many mechanics as I do in SokoSolitaire it comes quite naturally. As you are programming mechanics or making levels, ideas just come to you naturally. Last but not least, sometimes ideas come when you least expect them to. Sometimes I get them when I am showering, walking my dog or also when I am sitting on the toilet. Yes, the muse toilet is real, I can confirm her existence and I must say she's been very kind to me during my game making endeavours. I call her Poopelia.

3) Madness, chaos and a tiny drop of order

This is it! The method I forbid myself from using in SokoSolitaire. I'll talk in a bit about why, but first, what actually is it? Well, sometimes your boy Martin is very tired and frustrated because he just can't come up with a single good idea for a level, but he also really wants to make progress on his game. Therefore he sacrifices a friendly, local farm animal to the dark one and... Just slaps bunch of stuff together. Yep... A bit underwhelming, I know, but really sometimes I just make a random level layout, I put in bunch of objects and I try to make something out of via trial and error and then I refine it. Funnily enough, these levels take the longest time to make, usually at least double if not more than with the previous method. They often end up being very difficult and they almost always feel unfocused. People often stare at them and have no idea where to even start. This is why many praised SokoChess White for having more focused levels. I used this method way less in that game than the original.

Here's two levels from SokoChess that were made using this method. There are some good ideas and interactions in there, but the levels are too large which results in the player having way too many options where to move and looking back I do admit it's needlessly difficult to solve. It's funny, no matter how much I refine a level made this way, it never compares to when I make a level from scratch based on an idea.

A true master never stops being a student

With each game I always try something new and different, especially level design wise. With SokoChess White I focused more on making focused and refined levels and I am confident I managed to do it even better in SokoSolitaire. I hope I have a chance to write about this topic in another year or two. It'd be interesting to reflect on how much I'll change and improve by then. After all, there is still so much for me to explore and learn about level design. I hope you enjoyed this look into how I design levels for my puzzle games. Next time I'll put on my nerdy glasses (which I don't have, so I better go shopping soon) and I'll talk about how I program games and show you some of my code. Possible trigger warning, I'm a below average programmer, but I actually know how to get stuff done and finish games!

[ 2023-04-21 14:02:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

Today I'll talk about what the game looked like before Julieta jumped on board as an artist, what it looks like now and what I'd like to improve before the release!

5 games later and I am still awful at art

If you're familiar with my game Sokobos, you might disagree with this statement, but with Sokobos I got lucky. I made an appealing and stylish art style that was manageable even for me, however it took many attempts, consultation with friends and luck to come up with it.
Here's what SokoSolitaire was originally supposed to look like. It's serviceable for sure and clean enough. You can easily see what is what and where it is in relation to other things. Clarity is a must for puzzle games. However, having Julieta on board for SokoChess spoiled me. I want my games to look better these days. I learned a lot by making 5 games but art is just something I cannot get a grasp of no matter what I try.
This is one of the concept arts I made, I was playing with the idea of changing color palette of the background and the main character's suit as you progress through the game. Funnily enough the images above show off the more polished and better style I came up with, here's an image of what I was trying at first. No matter what I tried it just looked awful.
I seem to be better (although not good) at more abstract art styles, art that represents things rather than looking like them exactly. Going back to Sokobos, it's mostly just lines with spaces between them and a dominant black background, but I actually made it work. Funnily enough this made a lot of people compare the game to Baba Is You before release.

The truth about judging a book by its cover

After releasing 5 games on Steam, each having banner and game art of various quality from awful to good, I can confirm that people do indeed judge books and games by their cover. This reflects in impressions resulting in more store page visits, wishlists and even sales. You may know that my goal for 2023 is to become a full time game developer, so as much as I enjoy and love (not I love pizza kind of love, but actually love love) making games, I have to worry about things such as if people will want to buy the game and how much money it will make as a result. While working on SokoSolitaire, thinking all the art will be done by me, I felt very uneasy. I knew that the game's art is going to hurt the game, thankfully, I got lucky.

Julieta saves the day!

You may not be familiar with Julieta, but if you saw SokoChess or SokoSolitaire before, you know her art. Thankfully for me and SokoSolitaire, she ended up having time to design and make the art for it. Very quickly I realized we will have to change the game's native resolution. Originally SokoSolitaire was designed for 1280x720 with each cell on the grid being 48x48. However, non-pixel art needs to be bigger due to its more complicated composition and things such as anti-aliasing or outlines. After some experimenting on my part, I decided to increase the native resolution to 1600x900 and each cell was increased to 72x72. This was not done for SokoChess because the levels in it aren't as large as in SokoSolitaire.
It took us a while to make things look like what you see on the image above. We were struggling with the size of the cards for example. How big should they be? They shouldn't be too large so things don't look too noisy when many cards are close to each other, but they should be large enough so they are easily readable, remember, clarity matters. We also had to worry about their scale compared to our protagonist Mr. Cat! Another issue was finding the right outline thickness or as we on the internet say - THICCness.

Great, now let's change all the graphics again

Due to the increased resolution from 1280x720 to 1600x900, we ended up having a lot of empty space in smaller levels, so much that it actually ended up being distracting. I thought I'd solve it just like in Sokobos by zooming the camera in, well, that shed light on a whole new issue. What is great about Pixel art is that pixels are precise, there's no anti-aliasing and if you zoom in, the pixels just become larger and everything looks fine. However, in SokoSolitaire Mr. Cat art was exported into 72x72 resolution. Normally it looks fine, but if you zoom in, it becomes blurry as you can see the anti-alliasing artefacts and as a result it looks ugly and makes the whole game feel unpolished. I had no idea what causes this as this was never an issue for me before. Googling didn't help, maybe because it's such an obvious thing to other people nobody ever asks about it, maybe I wrote the question wrong or maybe it's because Google is mostly useless now because it's filled with ads these days. Perhaps it's a combination of all of the previously mentioned reasons. So I reached out to a friend of mine who has been an artist for over a decade, he knows so much about art of all kinds; traditional, digital, miniature painting, if you can name it, he has done it. I don't know what Mipmaps are exactly nor how they work, I just know they were the key to solving this issue. Here's how we fixed it. We exported the images as 576x576 instead of 72x72. When I was importing them to Godot I used the Mipmaps setting (which does something magical I quite don't understand) and then the sprite is down scaled to 0.125 size so it fits flawlessly into the 72x72 cell. Thanks to this if you zoom in, it's not blurry! You can see which image is originally 72x72 and which 576x576 on the image below.

What's next

I'm happy with how SokoSolitaire is looking right now, Julieta did a great job and the game looks even better than SokoChess. Personally, I'd like to add few more touches. For example, I'd like to include different images for Mr. Cat based on what he is doing. I want different graphics for just moving or moving while pushing. I think it would be neat to include some short, cute animation when you beat a level. I am also thinking of animating the background, nothing too flashy and distracting, maybe parts of the background can slowly move, stretch or something similar along those lines. Sometimes we also come back to an existing art and then remake it. For example, Mr. Cat now has more cat-like eyes and we also made his outlines thinner so you can see more of his suit! Of course, we will be also adding a tail.
All kind of ideas come and go as you develop a game, so we'll see what more we change and put in.

Farewell, for now

So that's where we are as of right now. Before I say good bye, I'd like to leave you with a final version of the banner art, we just couldn't help ourselves and we had to add Mr. Cat on it!
Thanks for making it this far! Let us know in the comments how you like SokoSolitaire's look so far. Is there anything you think we should add?

[ 2023-04-07 15:40:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

I'm excited to post the first Devlog for SokoSolitaire, I've never done this before, but I am looking forward to sharing the game's development journey with you and showing you what it is about before the full or even demo release. Let's get right into it!

Sokoban but it's cards

After finishing a fun casual game called Regency Solitaire, I was wondering what a mash-up of Sokoban and Solitaire would look like. I'll be honest, I definitely have a Sokoban obsession as I just keep thinking about how it could be combined with other games, funnily enough that's how SokoChess came to be.
I knew almost right away the goal would be to move cards to predetermined positions, emulating how you make tableaus in Solitaire. Of course, for the sake of the level design, I'd allow myself more freedom. You don't have to put in all the cards from King to Ace and furthermore the shape can differ or even bend compared to the original card game where it's always going from top to bottom, highest card to the lowest.

Bringing enough "cardness" to the game

Is that even a word? Anyway, that's the basic goal of each level established. However what kind of obstacles will the player have to navigate around and what actually makes the game worthy enough of being truly Solitaire inspired? I don't want it to just be dressed up as Solitaire, I want to carry elements of card games and Solitaire itself over.

Card stacking

This is a huge part of Solitaire, so I knew I have to carry it over. You can see the green coloured stacker on the previous screenshot. It works simply, but well. You stack cards on it from the lowest to the highest. So if you put a Queen on there, afterwards you can only put a King on top. When you move into it and it holds at least one card, it will push out the highest ranking card in your movement direction. If it's empty, you can move through it. Giving the player the ability to stack multiple cards like this makes for some fun puzzles and feels very unique. I'm not saying no Sokoban game ever did this, because I am sure some already did, but I myself did not see this implemented yet. Please leave a comment how little I know about Sokoban games and how many of them actually did this already, haha.

Flippers aka improved rotators from Sokobos

Rotating tiles in Sokobos were cool and mostly fun, but in some levels they could get a bit too tedious. Why? Because many blocks could be rotated in 90 degrees and sometimes you'd have to push a block back and fort on the rotator 3 times to get it the way you want it to be.
This is where flippers in SokoSolitaire come in. What kind of card-inspired game would it be if you couldn't flip cards, right? Well, the nice thing is that it's a binary thing, card is either flipped or not, so there's no need to flip it 3 times in a row. It's the same idea, but more elegant. Clarity is very important in puzzle games however, so even if you flip the card, you can still see what color and rank it is!

Card suits matter

At this point card suits and the color of each card was merely a matter of aesthetic, however I knew I wanted to implement a suit changing element to the game. So I added Suit changers, objects the player can walkthrough, but the moment a card is pushed onto one, it is consumed and changes the card's suit. It's not as simple as it sounds, you have to make sure you move the right card on it, meaning you have to make a path for it to get there.
And that's how SokoSolitaire got its basic identity. After making around 15 levels and letting a couple of people play them, I realized I have something worthy of becoming a full fledged game. Of course, there's even more puzzle elements than this, I'm undecided yet how many more I will reveal as I'd like to keep somethings secret for the full release. Thanks for making it this far, next time I'll be talking about the art of the game and I'll show you what it looked like before Julieta jumped on board for the project!

[ 2023-03-19 14:03:01 CET ] [ Original post ]