Spare Me

Spare Me is a game about bowling, a fun way to learn math, a love letter to the world's second best solitaire card game. Built for an iPhone, it should run in most browsers. Save games are supported and high scores are sharable. There are Easter eggs when you win, tributes when you lose, and the difficulty is as hard as you make it. Have fun.

Made on a Mac for the js13kGames competition.

Features

Spare Me has the following bits of awesomeness:

• play on any device with sweet scaling graphics
• get social bragging rights with tweetable high scores
• never lose your place with automatic save games
• crank up the competition with dynamic difficulty levels
• start bowling fast with an in-line tutorial

Credits

Spare Me was inspired by Sid Sackon's card game, Bowling Solitaire. I first heard about it from Neil Thomson's review on Board Game Geek. The rules are simple but the scoring is complex, and I felt that made it an ideal candidate for js13kGames. My version pawns off the adjacency rules as difficulty levels and ditches playing cards for thematic graphics.

Technology

Spare Me uses a pseudo random number generator based on the one described in the paper, A New Class of Invertible Mappings, by Alexander Klimov and Adi Shamer.

Graphics

All the graphics for Spare Me, with the exception of the GitHub Octocat and Twitter Bird, where created with HTML5 and CSS3. The background wood texture is a color shifted version of Randy Merrill's cicada stripes pattern. The pins and balls where based on Donovan Hutchinson's tutorial on CSS spheres. Button styling comes from Rishabh's demo for pushable buttons. The paper for score keeping and rules is Sarah Backhouse's lined paper pattern and the sticky tape that holds it up comes from Sharon's tutorial. The pencil is a tiny tilted version of Bryce Snyder's flat pencil. The text that shows up on strikes and spares is Mark Dotto's design. Finally, the title is done in the same neon that Dudley Storey uses for his bar sign.

Help

Sarah Mitchell pushed me to make the graphics better, and then took took them to a whole new level by doing the pencil resize that shows up in the icon and screenshot. Jon Gherardini pointed out how crazy hard the rules where, which became the driver behind difficulty levels.

Compatibility

Spare Me works in the following browsers:

• Firefox 32
• Chrome 37
• Safari 5.1
• Opera 12.16
• iOS Safari 6.1
• iOS Safari 7.1

License

Spare Me is licensed under a MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more details.