King - long live the king!

Card games have been played and will be played. For millennia, gamblers have tried hundreds of games and left a dozen. For centuries. If you become like literary critics, then any card games will come down to three plots - poker, preference and gin. For example, a fool is a simplified preference, a trump card of some sort.

I don’t know how it is now, but at school and on a fur-mat we were chopped off in preference for days and nights. Some managed to play lectures in an audience of 16-24. It’s convenient there. Rows - as in a circus. Therefore, many do not know MSS .
Girls preferred to play King , ladies preference. Good family game.

Easy to algorithmize, easy to program. As soon as I got a desktopPC and Turbo Pascal compiler , I first wrote a computer version of this game. It was 1991, maple leaves were falling. For rivals played the i286 , the classic minimax could not be implemented. The program honestly calculated the optimal answer with a depth of 3 moves. With a depth of stroke of 4, the computer periodically went into thoughtfulness for 30 minutes, which even the most stupid live players could not afford. I encrypted the entrance to the game with a 5-digit password (then it was fashionable). Password - the subscription index of the popular newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda , and the hint was right on the password entry screen.
A couple of times I called the journalists of the Komsomolin order to tell about the game, but I refused. Not because modest, but because there was no toilet paper at that time, people used newspapers. It’s clear where my article will go ...

King I under DOS

The first King was launched in the MS-DOS 2.0 operating environment. How was the game created?
Creating card games is easy. It is enough to draw 32 cards and know the screen resolution. The screen in DOS times was 640 by 350, cards - 64 by 96 pixels.



The card cover was pulled out of the tapeworm, the pictures for the ladies and kings he drew himself, holding before his eyes the images of famous Soviet cartoon characters from Winnie the Pooh to Cheburashka. I took pictures from magazines - there were no video cassettes with bright covers then. A couple of years later, the first handheld scanner appeared - the quality of the picture depended on the accuracy of your hand. Whack! Pull the scanner through the magazine and you're done. Pictures were black and white and small, and the scanner seemed like a miracle.

The game was quite popular, spread throughout the former Union on floppy disks. She didn’t bring money, at that time there was no money. There were food stamps and men's underpants.

King II under Windows 3.1

The second King was re-released under Windows, made in Visual Studio 2.0 in C ++. The transition to a new paradigm in 1997 was hard for me, in Pascal I thought linearly, and here some classes, some events appeared. The brain was not ready. Nevertheless, I made the game under the hard resolution of the Windows-window 640 by 480, the size of the maps was preserved, 64 by 96 pixels. The quality of the art has changed - I did not draw a card, but pulled it out of solitaire.dll. I inserted the proprietary microsoft images into the application.

There was a variant of the game with two boobs and a live opponent. The network game was made for the internal secret structure of our mathematical department (1,500 people) and did not go beyond the institute. For remote play I used MFC sockets.

King III under Windows CE 2.0

The third King was made for the iPaq 3700 in 2002. The first handheld computer, a fairy tale. Glitchy, but with Windows. The transition for development from MS VS to MS Embedded Studio was how to transfer from VAZ 2103 to VAZ 2101. Very natural. The size of the cards halved in each direction. The new screen size of 240 by 320 forced to change the image. On the surface of the card, only meaning and suit remained. The rest was annoyingly small and not informative. The process of installing the application on the device was annoying. A lot of magic dancing. The emulator worked well and quickly. Pressing the screen was carried out using a stylus. Since then, I hate styluses. They occupy a hand and get lost. Of course, after six months, all owners of handhelds used toothpicks instead of lost styluses.

King IV under Symbian

The fourth King was made for the Nokia 9210 in the same year 2002. It was not just a handheld computer, it was a communicator, a telephone. Legend. Epoc32. The same C ++, but a slightly different organization of output bitmaps. Development for Symbian did not cause any difficulties. The size of the cards returned to the original one again, because the screen size became 640 by 200, which reminded the first black-and-white CGA mode.



The emulator started, but very slowly - each start was accompanied by a 1-minute wait. Praise be to Allah, the Internet has appeared and information about which DLL to demolish from a computer so that there is no such delay. To install Nokia PC Suite, I had to not just dance, but dance with a tambourine and songs of the Na-na group. By the way, the phone is still in working condition.

King V under AS3.0

The fifth King was made in 2007-2008, when I comprehended the initial course of flash animation and received a development tool. This is an Adobe FLEX tool I officially bought for 100 rubles at a kiosk on Komsomolskaya Square. The check has been preserved.
Screen size and card size began to change dynamically, image quality has not changed. It was not possible to develop the game, because Mr. iOS came.

King VI for iOS 2.0

The sixth King was made for the iPhone in 2009. The screen size is 320 by 480, the optimal card size is 66 by 96. This size has been preserved for all future versions of the iPhone and I recommend it to you. I drew maps hastily, believing that the process is important, not the design. However, thanks to the card game, I learned to work in Photoshop. I made the images of the maps realistic, as if worn out by time.



The game was either paid (0.99), then free and brought in 4 years $ 229 and 11,864 downloads (see figure).

King VII for iOS 7.0

The seventh King was made yesterday and became free. I wanted to remake the game in accordance with the spirit of the times - flat design, animation, rotations, flips, ritbergers.
Rate what happened.



The powerful Internet gave me a sea of ​​pictures, I chose the heroes from South Park, in my opinion it turned out fine, in the style of iOS 7.
The game’s intelligence is low, but I think I’m thinking about the algorithm of playing for a computer.



Thank you for your attention, in conclusion I publish a link to the game, for free, all inclusive

• King of hearts