Everything changes; there is always room for improvement, and our solitaire games can benefit from this idea. Here at Glowing Eye games we do constant tweaks and improvements to our games so our fans and players get the best experience that we possibly can make. We have to, because the genre of solitaire is so full and making our games better is probably why we are still in around after 8 years!

A few months ago we released our remake of Pyramid Solitaire Ancient Egypt. What prompted us to completely rewrite our work was that the original code was getting so hard to maintain. Naturally, doing a remake meant we wanted to keep all the things our fans love while adding enhancements that people enjoy. Any game developers might think that such a project is relatively easy, but we found that there was a lot of effort required.

So what has changed and, more importantly, why?

Let’s start with the menu screen, and how we all remember it:

While this screen is lovely, we decided to spruce it up a little:

Our original artwork was good, but we had a think about how we could take it even further. The original graphics started life in our simpler, online version using a tiny resolution before being scaled up for iPhones and iPads. Of course even those resolutions are now dated and we had to support the beautiful screens that modern devices display. We enhanced the detail in the background, created the eye catching eclipse and updated our characters with beautiful new outfits. We wanted the game to feel friendly and sumptuous.

We made the game brighter and our cards easier to read, but this actually took a few attempts to get right. When you change something that some people play every day you can expect a reaction! That is exactly what happened to us until we ended up with: –

From a technical point of view, our biggest change was our game engine. Our lead programmer, Gregg, created a 2D engine based on the OpenGL. This allowed us to easily add beautiful particle effects that adorn Pyramid Solitaire Ancient Egypt and our other games, as well as making future updates easier with the continually changing iOS tech.

The final thing we did was review the game and scoring mechanics, fine tuning them to make the whole game feel slicker and better in general. We didn’t quite nail this the first time, and we got a massive amount of feedback from our players!

We always put a great emphasis on the smoothness of the game, including how cards move and the timings they have while playing. We tried to match what we had previously but we made a few mistakes, and the players noticed and told us where we went wrong!!! As a team we were never sure how important those kind of things really were so it was an excellent learning experience before we fixed and improved everything so it felt awesome!

Our score tweaks also caused some issues, but after a round of improving the range of bonus scoring options we found our players were very happy with how everything worked. We are exceptionally lucky to have some very devoted fans who contacted us directly to give their opinions.

But there is one thing we discovered while making our luxurious version of Pyramid Solitaire Ancient Egypt; whatever theme we make, some people just want to play on a classic velvet green background. They find the theme distracting, and there is nothing that can change that.

So the team talked. For us, making the themed versions of these games allows us to express ourselves creatively and to create eye catching card games in a genre where so many others would benefit from crafting the experience. But like it or not, most players would never even consider the themed version because they wanted something familiar.

We feel it’s important to listen to the players, even though the setting was less artistically interesting for us, we decided to try and make the traditional version of pyramid solitaire available on the iPhone or iPad. We kept the gratifying smoothness of our game, maintained the scoring system that lets you play strategically and wrapped it up in the best casino theme that we possibly could.

For this production we made it our mission to create the best classic pyramid solitaire game around. We think it’s gone well and we’re proud of what we’ve made, and now we trust that solitaire players will agree!

Download it here!

I’m happy to say that our new website is running smoothly, feeling great, and is a huge improvement on what we had previously. However, there has been a change in how to play our games from the website; it’s still super easy, just a little different to how it was before.

Firstly, click the game you want to play from the home page. This will take you to the game page and from there click the ‘Solitaire Paradise’ button, as you can see below:

If you’re still having trouble then feel free to watch this brief video which will take you through each step. We’ve used Ancient Egypt as an example, but it’s relevant to any game:

I hope this helps, and happy playing 🙂

The Road so Far  for Glowing Eye Games

Here at Glowing Eye Games we’re a small company of only ten people, quietly confident in the fun games we make. With eight years under our belt we’ve become a well-oiled machine; a great team who are dedicated to producing games of the highest quality that you can enjoy.

As the newest member of the team I’ve taken it upon myself to delve into the history of Glowing Eye Games, interviewing our Managing Director, Head of Production and our Associate Producer for a little inside knowledge. First for the quick low down:

Mark Klocek
Managing Director

Previously Worked at: – Glu Mobile

Max Brode
Head of Production

Previously Worked at: – Sega & EA

David Brown

Associate Producer

Previously Worked at: – EA

In the beginning

Even before the introduction of the iPhone and App Store our dear leader J, Mark, was already working on mobile games. He worked with the talented team at Glu Mobile – recently famous for the ridiculously popular Kim Kardashian game – but after a few years it was time to break. With a tiny loan he set out and created Glowing Eye Games, although at the start it was all about online games. Initially there were a few experiments. The first was Star Crash, a simple game made on a shoe string budget. The aim of Star Crash was simply to test the process and the market allowing Mark to start on much more ambitious projects.  Some of these never saw the light of day, but from each one he learned something new. After a few trials Glowing Eye Games finally developed its first big success in Magic Towers Solitaire, which is still one of our most popular games today.

Interestingly Magic Towers was created purely as a smaller game while working on other projects. It’s success and the reaction from players was a pleasant surprise. It showed there was this untapped niche in simple card games that had been unexplored. I mean, you can get standard versions of solitaire on your computer, but you have to admit they can be a bit bland. Glowing Eye Game saw the potential in making these games fun and appealing again, with lots of bright colours, friendly characters and making them smooth, slick and easy to use. Glowing Eye Games’ had found its niche. With this minor triumph came the launch of Solitaire Paradise – a website that still has our games today (solitaireparadise.com if you’re interested wink).

The Fruits of Success

With the release of Pyramid Solitaire Ancient Egypt, the number of players continued to increase and the work soon became too much for one person. Although Mark had worked with freelance programmers and artists in the past, Glowing Eye Games needed its own team to create the quantity and quality of games that the players wanted. With that in mind Mark approached Chris – an old friend and gifted programmer – Katie, Chris’ wife, who happened to be a talented artist and quickly taught herself in magical craft of Photoshop and Illustrator. Shortly after it was clear that a producer was needed. Which is where Max bursts through the door. Well actually he is impeccably well mannered, so he knocked!

German, born and bred, Max took his first steps in the game industry at Sega (armed with an incredibly relevant English Literature degree).  Starting out as a language tester, friendship and talent blossomed into an opportunity in producing. With major successes like Sonic Jump, Max became a rock-solid producer but due to company instability decided that going freelance would be a better option. Of course as Glowing Eye Games’ work load grew Max was happy to settle down and bring his talents permanently to the team.

Around the time of Max’s hire, Kawe also joined the team. As a friend from Mark’s Glu days he fit right in, and he previously created the artwork for Pyramid Solitaire – Ancient Egypt. He brought Gregg on board and now they’ve become lead artist and head of development respectively. At this point Glowing Eye Games had branched out and was experimenting with domino games, namely Mexican Train Dominoes Gold, which is still steaming along today.

In the next couple of years our team expanded once again with the hire of Alessio, a programmer, Stephanie, our games tester, and David our associate producer. Like Mark and Max, David pre-dates the app store (his words, not mine!) and has spent years in the games industry. Working as a games tester with the giant EA, he went the same route as Max and became a producer. He worked on some great games, including the smash hits Burn Out and Cranium, but felt that his time with the games industry had come to a close. That was until he heard the strong call of Glowing Eye Games and couldn’t resist jumping straight back in. As an associate producer he’s in charge of localisation, translating our games so they can be played across the world and managing the testing process.

Finally of course there is me, Jasmine. I’m rather new here, only three weeks in and clearly hired because of my witty quips and unrelenting optimism (or maybe Mark just needed someone to manage the social media… See what I mean about the optimism?). Either way, they’ve let me loose in the blog section and you’ll be hearing a lot more from me!

Now that you know all the ins and outs of our past and our team, I’m sure that your dying to know what we’ve been working on recently.

Coming soon

Our games have been on the App store for a long time, and we’ve built quite a following. We’ve been so focused on other projects that we haven’t had the time to update them yet. But recently we’ve decided to take the plunge. Currently we’re in the process of modernising them to get the most of out of the iPhones and iPads you enjoy them on. We’ve been rebuilding them so they are easier to update, more beautiful and even more fun.

Right now we are working on Golf Solitaire Pro and Pyramid Solitaire – Ancient Egypt.

Take a look at Ancient Egypt

Before:

After:

As you can see the original style remains, but we’ve got better fonts, the background is stronger and the outfits have gone through a complete makeover!

And we are also working on one of Katie’s earliest games, Forty Thieves Solitaire Gold. With all the experience she has racked up over the years we felt that we could make it even more enticing and playable.

The progress so far:

You may be familiar with these screenshots. We’re still pretty proud of the artwork for Forty Thieves, but considering that it’s one of our earlier games it’s due for an update.

Our artists and programmers have worked relentlessly to bring you these scenes. We decided that Forty Thieves was missing something, in particular some characters. So drawing inspiration from the Arabian fairy tale we created some great characters, which you can see here:

We’ve also given the backgrounds and once over too! And a big change we made is to the cards, now on a white background and a better font they’re much easier to read.

I think that just about brings us to the end of the post. Thanks for playing our games, and please continue to give us such great reviews, we really, really appreciate it.

That’s all for now, speak to you next time!