My team made Faerie Solitaire. Ask me almost anything!

This is a great question. You gave away so many copies! I'm sure it was to gain awareness of your development team (liked you on Steam and Facebook and had no liked you prior to your giveaways) so that's one out of hopefully the hundreds of new contact points you received!

The major goal with Faerie Solitaire was to create a game which was commercially viable and genuinely fun. A lot of things in its development were done specifically to be as appealing as possible (I can explain the specifics if there is interest). That said a lot of heart and love as a gamer myself was put into making it. Much of the design was made to be as intuitive and user-friendly as possible. The game took nine solid months to make.

Even with our intentions we still made many mistakes in the development. There was a lot of content cut from the game. Wisdom? I would tell myself to focus on what matters most and that is the core gameplay. We wasted about a whole month adding in mini-games (Quests) to the game. They turned out to be more annoying than fun. I learned a lot from developing FS and I've learned a lot more since, but a lot of that learning and knowledge I feel is stuff which has to be internalized by making mistakes. What is important is learning how to learn from mistakes and to not repeat the same mistakes over and over. My biggest mistakes in the past were making games which were not fun and trying to make too big of games. Doing both with a project means you spend a lot of time making a big game which is not fun - time wasted. Now I spend more time making sure a game idea is fun before I commit, and I try to only focus on the fun parts of a game. I can go on and on but like as a developer we have assumptions of what should go into a game, but those things are not necessarily what makes the game fun. Work is not fun. Pain is not fun. I try to limit both of those in my games, but still some creep in. So if I could go back and talk with myself I'd say to make smaller games and focus on just what makes the game fun.

I have 93% 28/30 :)

a) If I told you the exact number it would reveal the number of copies sold to anyone who can do some math. The public stats are here: http://steamcommunity.com/stats/FaerieSolitaire/achievements To answer your question based on those stats it is very likely only 3% of people who have played FS on Steam have 100% of the achievements.

b) There has been no better time than now to be a game developer. The industry will continue to evolve and grow and those who adapt will profit. That said I'd make more money not making games, so I choose to make games and not make as much as I could otherwise.

I'm 90% 27/30 myself, I'm going to get 100 someday!

I have 99% and I'm too lazy to evolve all pets.

/me gives Kowiz a cookie.

Excuse me mister, no begging.
Don't want to end up like the other guy, do you now?

There are a few projects but the most active one is Faerie Alchemy. It is in public alpha right now and is playable here:

http://subsoap.com/games/faerie-alchemy/html5/

http://subsoap.com/games/faerie-alchemy/flash/

Here's a preview of what is coming next feature wise. None of that is final art but you can get an idea. I can even answer questions about this although nothing is guaranteed to be in the final version.

FS2 will be released next year if I can help it along with a few other games which have long been in development. FS2 will likely have DLC support (not 100% sure) and each DLC will be worth the price or will just be free. I want to implement more Steamworks features into my future games.

Before it was released on Steam I was happy with how much it sold - everything from Steam has been a nice bonus. It was originally released in 2009 on the Casual portals and only released late last year on Steam. I don't publish numbers publicly. We make enough to keep going but it's not always easy and we are absolutely not rich, but it is enough to continue making more games without having to get other full time jobs.

/me gives AliSama a great big hug!

It will likely be a Steam exclusive even!

the game is fun. The only thing i would love to have changed is that the animals you find and grow could help you with stats, or luck etc. that would make raising them and finding the items to evolve them more worth while!

I hope you enjoy the game! Thank you for your support. :)

Awesome! Thank you! :)

Big Fish Games actually got a patent for the mechanics specific to Fairway Solitaire, although if it is enforceable is questionable. It's sad that they were able to patent parts of a solitaire variation which is very old. See their other patents here. I don't like patents nor software patents specifically. I've made stuff which would be able to be patented but do not want to involve myself in that system. Truthfully when I die I'd like all of my work to go into the public domain, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to do that in the right.

I would say that Fairway Solitaire does many things which I would not do such as randomly punishing players and using less than fair gameplay mechanics. It's still a good game and has its merits. There are a few games which use the same up/down tri-peaks/golf mechanic. My game is not perfect but I think it's a better game than the others - at least based on my goals with making games.

Faerie Solitaire 2 is everything good about Faerie Solitaire but better. We have another solitaire game in the works which has the same improvements implemented but has a more hardcore/Steam friendly theme hopefully and will be ready sometime next year.

Thank you for your support! :)

I've always been into making things, and I still do. Around 2000 I started making games just because I could. I made many , many terrible games, but learned a lot from each one. Here are two games I had been working on before FS which I consider failures:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/116871/fail/pdom.exe
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/116871/fail/ROE_9_non.exe

If you want to make games (I would not recommend it unless you have love for it) then accept that you will fail a lot before you finish something worth selling. If you never give in then success is inevitable.

I make games with faeries just so people get given a hard time from their Steam friends for playing a game with faerie in the name. :)

The truth is it just happened, and now I want to make more games with Faerie in the name. It's hard to pick good names for games (so many obvious ones are taken), and I can build a brand by putting Faerie in the name of my games. Eventually people to recognize a game with Faerie in the name as probably being by me, and people on Steam will maybe be less forgiving as some of my future "Faerie" games will be a little more hardcore. I feel sorry for devs 10+ years from now because they will have to be super creative with how their games are named. But it's the same thing for books or movies, and sometimes people will use the same name for different products and be able to get away with it.

BEWARE SPOILERS AHEAD:

(You should probably edit your post to say there are spoilers in it. This forum needs a spoiler tag..)

Actually I'm not going to comment on this but just wait for FS2 and everything will make more sense. There's a prequel too which explains the story before FS1 and that will be 100% free (basically the demo for FS2).

Thank you for your support! :)

/me gives Kapol le sizzling bacon

My job is really fun and I get to be creative and work on interesting projects every day. Because I'm indie. If you work for another company you will very likely be working on some small specialized thing and either be lucky enough to love it or it will just be another job. I wear many hats and do a good majority of the work which goes into my games. I work crazy, unrealistic hours, but it's the life I choose willingly. It kind of just happened and I've been stuck doing it since. A few years ago I was spending more time varying the sorts of things I was doing, but then I needed money so I thought I could make games. It took a few years before I made something commercially viable. I would not quit doing this ever. I have no interest in selling my work to another company or working for another company. We'll remain completely independent so that we can continue to have fun and do the things we want to do. My team right now is me and two other coders plus some very close friends who work on various things with me.

I hate the tedious parts. Usually those are the non-creative aspects of making something where I have to repeat the same steps over and over for something. I've tried to minimize those sorts of things as much as possible.

Someone should buy and play Faerie Solitaire if they want a fun and long game to play which will reward them for playing. The game takes a minimum of 14 hours or so to complete, and more if you want to 100% it. It's a lot of value for your money. It is the same mechanic over and over, but the layouts, backgrounds, and music is varied so it's not so bad. If played with some time between sessions it will never stop being an enjoyable game to play.

All future games will target: Win, Mac, Linux, Flash, HTML5, iOS, Android, XBLA/360. We can potentially target Wii and PS3 too though those require more specialized contracts. It is VERY likely we will be making games for newer consoles in the future. FS on the DS systems would be great for sure, though I've contacted Nintendo before and we're not yet big enough in their eyes to get a dev kit.

I feel that you are an awesome person and I hope getting 100% make you feel thusly awesome.

The story was written by a friend Tim (in the credits) and I. I kind of had a basic idea and just went with it. I regret how the story was told in FS1 because it's pretty cool just not told well - my mistake. Everything will come together and make better sense in FS2.

If you want to be a better writer I recommend these articles:

http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-day.html

http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-i-plot-novel-in-5-steps.html

Last month I wrote 30 picture books. The first 7 days of this month I wrote a 70k word novel.

If enough people ask them to include Faerie Solitaire in one of their bundles it would be possible.

I'm not going to say because I don't want anyone to support the company who made it - they have lost my support for using ridiculous DRM and censoring their community in stupid ways among other things. The tool you make things with does not matter. FS could have been made with any tool.

What we are using now is a language called Monkey: http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/

The Faerie Alchemy alpha I posted above is being made using Monkey!

One day.

and yea please if you make something like that please make multiplayer in it . that will be awesome

The level of polish put into PopCap's games. All of the games I've ever played. Love for fantasy. Probably any game with pets/trainable monsters that I've played. I see it as my job to play as many games as I can to learn what is good to do what is not good to do. Sometimes when I play a game I'm stuck in developer mode and I often go why would they do such a thing.