A new solitaire game is released!

This week, Goodsol Development has released Goodsol Solitaire 101, a new solitaire game with (surprise!) 101 different solitaire variants to play. A 30-day trial version of Goodsol Solitaire 101 is ready to download here [6.7M]. The full version is only $19.95 and includes 34 bonus games and the ability to submit high scores online. As one may have have assumed, our company, SophSoft, Incorporated, did most of the development, and I (personally) did all of the programming.

Although the number of games puts this product squarely between Most Popular Solitaire, with 30 games (all included in GS101), and Pretty Good Solitaire, with 700 games (including all of the GS101 variants), this game provides features not available in either of those titles. In particular, Goodsol Solitaire 101 is the first card game to feature climb mode, which allows players to compete and compare scores with others on an even playing field. More generally, GS101 incorporates all of the better features of both of its aforementioned siblings.

On the technical side, Goodsol Solitaire 101 is a major innovation. The game is based on a new internal engine that is (just about) cross-platform, and the rules for each solitaire game are (almost) entirely data-driven. We can now produce new titles, for both Windows and (soon) Mac OS X, by altering only two source files and changing the supplied resources, and the inevitable bugs will be fixed on all related products simultaneously. However, the user experience is similar to (and better than) those of the existing Goodsol products. It took a relatively long time to get this engine done correctly, but now we expect to reap the benefits.

This is just the beginning of what should be a number of regular product announcements over the coming months (and years), seasoning all of the other posts on this blog. Stay tuned…