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Sparrow Solitaire Tile Workshop

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 01 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A little known feature of Sparrow Solitaire is its ability to load user-generated content from files copied onto the Playdate. One day I thought it would be cool to combine two tile sets, so I built a web app to do it!

A wild tile set builder appears! sparrowsolitaire.com/workshop/

3-in-1

As well as allowing you to cherry pick tiles from existing sets (and sharing that selection data with people), you can also load your own image data into the “user” row. This is done using the Pasteboard text area, which accepts a few different types of data.

First it accepts a PNG URL which will be loaded into the user row and must be the correct dimensions.

Secondly it accepts data:image (recommended & most versatile) which can be of any dimension. You can easily copy data:image straight out of the Piskel pixel art web app. You can also generate it on the command line, using the small script below, or using an Alfred workflow or similar automation.

Thirdly, and finally, if you’d rather create a full tile set of your own, you can do it all in Piskel and save it online as a GIF. Paste this URL into Tile Workshop and you can save it straight to an image format suitable for use on your Playdate.

Please do get in touch if you create any tile sets of your own!

Sparrow Solitaire for Playdate

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve previously written about the Playdate game Sparrow Solitaire, when we released the Early Access version of the game. That was almost 9 months ago and a lot has changed!

This week the hugely expanded full version of the game released on itch.io, where it’s been for sale for a while, and on Playdate Catalog the new on-device store. It even got its own website!

This post is a continuation of the history of the development of the game, going into the conceptual decisions and visual inspiration.

Mahjong or not Mahjong, that is the question?

This type of game is commonly called Mahjong Solitaire, because it uses mahjong tiles to form the layouts and it’s usually a single-player game. But the traditional tiles are somewhat inscrutable to newcomers. They are from a totally different game that goes by the name of Mahjong, which further confuses the situation. For this reason most Mahjong Solitaire games use alternative, more recognisable and approachable tile patterns.

Whilst reading about the history of mahjong, I discovered that in Chinese the game was originally called 麻雀 (pinyin: máquè)—meaning sparrow. This seemed like a nice alternative name for the game, allowing me to use alliteration, and avoiding the complexity that comes with the traditional mahjong tiles, and of course having cultural sensitivity top of mind.

A brief history of Mahjong Solitaire

Mahjong Solitaire is widely considered a Western invention in much the same way as French-suited playing cards and their related Patience/Solitaire games, but both have their origins in China.

Computer game Mahjong Solitaire was originally created by Brodie Lockard in 1981 on the PLATO system and named Mah-Jongg after the game that uses the same tiles for play. Lockard claimed that it was based on a centuries-old Chinese game called “the Turtle” that he had been shown whilst in hospital after a serious accident that left him paralysed from the neck down.

Not only did Brodie create the PLATO version in 1981 using only his mouth to type the code and draw the graphics, but he went on to make the Apple Macintosh version which was published in 1986 by Activision, as Shanghai, which sold millions of copies. Shanghai II came in 1989 and a whole new genre of games was born.

Wherefore art thou Macintosh?

An interesting point about the first two versions of the computer game: they both had monochrome displays (also referred to as 1-bit). PLATO was orange on black, and Macintosh was black on white. Funnily enough Playdate is also monochrome: dark grey on pale grey. Upon seeing the Sharp Memory LCD display that is used in the Playdate I was instantly reminded of the original Apple Macintosh. I mean, I still use System 7 on an iPad Pro and have a 1991 Macintosh Classic at home so it did not take much to remind me, but it did.

My initial explorations around 1-bit graphics happened on Macintosh, long before I had ever held a Playdate in my hands. I explored fill patterns, dithering algorithms (eventually discovering and popularising a little known algorithm), old drawing software optimised for 1-bit graphics, and diving head first into old clip art collections. Sparrow Solitaire could be considered the culmination of all of this exploration and gathered knowledge presented in a single game.

Once I got hold of a Playdate I started thinking about implementation details. Coding prototypes, figuring out sizes, textures, shadows, frame rate, tricks, optimisations, but with no particular game in mind. Just sailing free across a sea of ideas.

I struck upon a novel way to generate patterns of dots. Instead of using organised Beyer dither patterns, I used error diffusion dithering and fed it a solid colour. When a shade of grey is run through Burkes dithering algorithm it produces organic-looking patterns of dots that are ever so pleasing to the eye. Interestingly, other dithering algorithms don’t exhibit the same result. This image became a catalyst and the core of Sparrow Solitaire.

After this I drew the traditional Chinese mahjong tile set, and figured out a tile size that would allow the standard Mahjong Solitaire layouts to fit fully on screen. Unlike the PLATO and Macintosh games, which used border thickness to denote the height of a tile in the layout, I offset the tiles in a sort of isometric view and added a repeating shadow dither pattern. After this I drew regional variations for Japan, Europe and America. I drew tile sets inspired by the original late-90s Japanese Emoji set, others based on Egyptian and Toki Pona heiroglyphs, and an alphanumeric tile set I thought might be easiest for newcomers. I even recorded sounds of my own mahjong tiles.

Sunset

I found (and promptly forgot about until just now!) royalty free sound effects of sparrows, rain, button presses, confirmation tones. During all of this, amongst my normal music listening, I stumbled across a song that I thought sounded really great: it was the track “Starry Dish” by Yuyake Monster a Japanese music producer. The track is a sort of bouncy low-fi video-game hip-hop and piano thing. I wanted to hear more by this musician, so I clicked on their profile and listened to the next track. It was “Herbal Remedies” and I liked it even more! It featured plucked strings and a melodic bass line and… about half way through… bird song! And these tunes were already tagged as royalty free, so it was meant to be. When I reached out to Yuyake Monster they were super happy to have their music used in a game.

It was at this point that I released a prototype with graphics, sounds and animation of the layout dealing. I quickly realised that it would take a lot of time and effort to finish the game, so I made the difficult decision to abandon it. But work resumed later on with the help of Mac Vogelsang, as you can read about in my earlier blog post.

One vision

Mac had taken on the majority of the programming, slowly eroding what remained of my prototype code and refactoring things into a more solid foundation. I was concentrating on graphics and animation. We shared game design decisions. By this point we had both played a ton of mahjong solitaire games from the original Shanghai on Macintosh, through versions on almost every home console, handheld and home computer platform, to versions on the latest Nintendo consoles. We had a thorough understanding of things that worked well with a mouse, what did not work so well with a game controller, what worked best on screen and what limitations these old platforms imposed on the games.

Comparing Playdate to the best handhelds from the 90s it became obvious that we were working with a much more capable device, in terms of both CPU power and graphical fidelity. We could lean into the strengths of the device and provide a tailored experience that made use of the Playdate’s unique control mechanism - the crank - as well as its excellent sound and graphics hardware. I hope Mac will write more about getting the most out of the device, writing code that made the most of Playdate performance to do things that have never been done before in a mahjong solitaire game. Sparrow Solitaire has truly ground-breaking features some of which are only possible on Playdate.

Meanwhile, with the prompting and encouragement of Mac, I researched classic Chinese and Japanese painting techniques and drew some Eurasian tree sparrows and cherry blossom in the classic ink and watercolour style.

These illustrations were used to create the game’s launch animation. I started to create the animation the traditional way, but quickly changed tact and created it programatically instead.

Content matters

For the full version of the game I created additional backgrounds, cursors, grids, animations, tools to aid development and more besides. I created several fonts, all carefully kerned and tweaked to look their best on the Playdate. I’d created a popular font in my teens and it was fun to get back to that. More backgrounds, more tile sets including my favourite “zen”. Even now, when I see this tile set in the game, I often shake my head in disbelief. How was I capable of drawing these symbols so well at such a small size? My Susan Kare moment, if you will. If ever there was a lesson that you should believe in your own abilities, this was it for me.

Hidden in plain sight

The influence of the Macintosh and the nostalgia in the final look and feel of the game is something I wear proudly. Sparrow Solitaire is the sum total of all my passions and interests, wrapped up in a neat little game that will provide hundreds of hours of fun and relaxation.

But what about if you look a little deeper? You will find brush/fill patterns from MacPaint, Atkinson dithering as first seen in ThunderScan, elements drawn in UltraPaint, pixels generated using DeBabelizer, and so much more. Heck, we even use Garamond as our brand typeface which is the same one Apple used in their classic Macintosh advertising, the most well known of which is the “Think different” campaign. Sparrow Solitaire is my love letter to the Macintosh, but runs on a device that fits in the palm of your hand.

One of my favourite “Easter Eggs” in Sparrow Solitaire is some clip art from the Scroll collections, published in 1986/87 by Japanese Macintosh specialists Enzan-Hoshigumi. Specifically I have used a border for the manual/credits overlay, and several sections of artwork for our patterned backgrounds. These sections of artwork were not bundled as brushes/fills, but are nevertheless easy to cut out and use as a repeating fill in an image editor. They are based on repeating elements that are much larger than the 16x16 pixel patterns of MacPaint, so they allow for patterns that are not as garish and easier on the eyes. Plus, I love the fact that in 2023 Enzan-Hoshigumi finally have their first video game credit, almost 40 years after working on their first video game.

The Great Wave of Mahjong

Finally, to come full circle back to the image seen in the trailer at the top of the page: “The Great Wave of Mahjong”. I came up with the concept for the image and commissioned the wonderful Vxcl to create it, leaving them free to interpret the brief. They pretty much nailed it first time, and there were only a handful of small notes from me - in the form of screen grabs with coloured highlighter markup - to tweak the alignment of details of a few elements. This is the second such render I’ve commissioned, a look inspired by 1980s Japanese PC/game mags.

You can download a high resolution version of this image at itch.io to use as PC/phone wallpaper.

Update!

Less than two weeks after version 1.0 we released an update to address a few small issues and add a bunch more content! It features dynamic weather effects, three new tile sets and more cool stuff. You can read about version 1.1 in this Twitter thread.

Elsewhere

2024-03-08—Playdate Community Awards 2023: Best Puzzle Game

Sparrow Solitaire for Playdate (Early Access)

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This post is a history of Sparrow Solitaire, my latest game for Playdate. It started out as a prototype and was later taken on by Mac Vogelsang. We’re working together to make the best ever mahjong solitaire game.

2021, January 10th

I’m really into Hanafuda (Japanese flower cards) and found that the 1991 Macintosh game Shanghai featured tiles based on Hanafuda. I booted it up at Internet Archive and had a quick play.

For the next week or so I went down the Shanghai rabbit hole. Its history is quite interesting and fraught with drama so I won’t repeat it here.

2021, January 19th

This is the date on the first screenshot I captured of my prototype mahjong solitaire game for Playdate.

I tested different size tiles until I found the sweet spot that could fit a whole layout on the Playdate’s 400x240 screen.

The following day I drew a set of tiles and it started to look like a real game! I called it Sparrow Solitaire because the sound of mahjong tiles rubbing together is said to sound like sparrows chirping. In fact, the original Chinese name for mahjong reused the word for sparrow. So this thing had a name at least!

I spent the next month or so, on-and-off, programming object-oriented Lua to manage the game state, tiles, layout, dealing, sound effects and I drew a handful more tile sets.

Daily Driver was my focus and this little puzzle game was supposed to be a short palate cleanser to keep things interesting. When it turned out to be more involved I lost momentum and abandoned it. My todo list at that time was as follows:

Todo
[ ] calc free data per half position
[ ] sound based on free data
[ ] controls to move prev/next tiles
[ ] controls to select tiles
[ ] match tiles
[ ] face down all tiles
[ ] face up free tiles
[ ] editor
[ ] optimise animations

Done
[X] sound effects
[X] define layouts to fill screen
[X] animate tiles
[X] multi-dimension array (as autotable)
[X] ability to reinit table

What an optimistically short set of todo items! That’s game programmers for you.

2022, April 15th

When Playdate launched I bundled the game in my pack of Prototypes and tried to forget about it.

2022, May 12th

I couldn’t stop thinking about the game and it seemed a shame that I had put so much effort into it and then abandoned it. But I’m a realist and I knew that I would never finish it myself. So I thought it would be fun to offer it out to any interested developers and see if they wanted to finish it. No replies to this tweet, but the same message on the Playdate Squad Discord server had some responses. I decided to hand over to Mac Vogelsang (@vogelscript) as I had really enjoyed his Bird and Beans game. So a few days later he began work “finishing off” my programming. What an understatement.

2022, July 13th

For the last two months Mac has worked his magic on the game and I’ve tagged along for the ride. Having worked on my own for so long I wondered what it would be like working with somebody else. It was more fun and productive than I ever could have expected! Mac brought the best out of me, pushing me to achieve better results than I would have otherwise been happy with. Mac also pushed himself, creating what I believe to be a world-first method of cursor control in a mahjong solitaire game, made possible by two properties of Playdate: its fast processing speed and its lack of touch screen!

Out of this partnership not only comes a great game, but some new offshoot projects like an Animation tool (from me), a board game (from Mac), and a Game Options class (Mac’s magic reworking of one of my old classes) and several new fonts some of which are used in Sparrow Solitaire. These projects should all release in the near future.

At this point Sparrow Solitaire is really Mac’s game, albeit one that happens to have my graphics and some of my programming DNA in it, so it’s fitting that it will live on his itch.io page.

Launch Animation

Download

Update, April 2023: the full version of Sparrow Solitaire for Playdate is available now on itch.io and you can also read about what to went into the full game.