Bloody Mary OS!

This weekend, we decided to make a fun game that emulates an operating system!

Although the operating system UI part of it is not finished yet, we ended up with a good looking game with some quirky features!

About the look and feel

Our goal with this game was that the user would think that they are booting up an old machine running a fictional OS. In that OS, there will be installed a bunch of solitaire games, each of which represents a different culture or story about the world.

Yes, we literally made 5 different variants of solitaire just for the sake of fun, keke :).

Each of the game is very well polished, as our team is an art-major centric team! However, since the idea of the OS was so new, we did not have the chance to polish it up yet. We however will do more work on this after the hackathon!

This, of course, lead us to our next point, which is:

Our track is the Best Design Track!

Just try to take a look over what we did and maybe that might pique your interest in playing the games!

Also, I forgot to mention our motivation on choosing solitaire as our central idea of the game. Coming to the hackathon, we know for sure we want to make something like a game in order to be cool. We also looked through different types of games, and eventually we settled on puzzles. When choosing solitaire, we realized that the ordinary solitaire that people used to play on their Windows machines are fine, but they aren't great. It's near the end of the year 2024, and we decided to enhance the puzzle genre of playing cards by making radically different variants of solitaire that we enjoy playing. We also hope that you, a potential player, would enjoy it too.

So, we spent a while playing through lots of solitaire apps, sipping through lots of ads, and after making this game, we think ours is not that far off from your solitaire from App Store. Despite the vast majority of games related to this type of puzzle, we find our art style to be distinct enough and our rule sets to be out of the water enough for a change.

Well, maybe making our design distinct is another justifiable reason for the Best Design track, isn't it?

We used Figma, btw, and it actually helped us

When playing the games, you may notice that each of the variant have its own unique look and mechanics to it. The layout and styling from game to game could be radically different too. At the start of the hackathon, we had a functional game but not so nice graphics; however, we managed to resolve this after learning how to use a new tool called Figma.

Our workflow was that we would play with the layout and coloring of cards and the backgrounds in Figma, then utilize that information and put it into the game. Because our game is made in C++ using a custom graphics engine we built, we had to do lots of configuration in order for the integration to be smooth. We believe that you would notice the small attention to details when playing the games, either it be the closing of the stacks or the different types of animations for the cards when it moves. Using Figma, we were able to visualize how different easing animations will be in the game and also what bezier curves will be like compared to the cubic splines.

Overall, we encourage you to play it at our desk table at the hackathon because it's a lot of fun! Also, it will help us notice bugs that we might have missed during the development of the game.

On a technical note, we did the following:

Built everything from scratch, using OpenGL as the graphics backend and audio with PulseAudio on Linux.
Designed the art assets with Gimp and Figma for the general layout of the game.
Made our own UI library for widgets like subwindows, buttons, sliders, etc.
Asset catalog system for auto hotreload when exporting files from other programs, this is so that the changes made externally on disk is reloaded dynamically.
Of course, we did our own engine of the solitaire games. What type of programmers do you think we are :)?

Thank you WHACK for such wonderful event!

We got free t-shirts!
We got ice-cream!
The food was great! We really mean it, though. Having a salad bar was great!!!!!
Got some beanies!

You know... all of that is enough for us to go back here next year!

Plans

Our immediate plan is to do the rest of the UI for the operating system. Then we think we will port this to Android and iOS. Since the mobile platforms requires stricter usage of the graphics backend, which we did account for when using OpenGL as we would only need to switch the target to embedded device and the rest should be smooth sailing (hopefully)!

Additionally, we plan to add a couple more solitaire variants to the package.

If you have any suggestions, email us at thuctd.tran(at)gmail.com!

Thanks.