Somehow it’s been suspiciously quiet over here at Doppelkopf Club. The last update babbles about some lukewarm April Fools joke. And after that? Nothing. Complete radio silence.

Has Doppelkopf Club run out of steam?

Quite the opposite! Summer months tend to be a little more quiet but I’ve taken a lot of time to improve things and build the foundation for future features.

Work Behind the Scenes

A lot of work happened behind the scenes lately. Most of it is hard to notice for Doppelkopf Club players:

• Performance: I put a lot of work into tuning the performance of this website. Pages now load faster, transfer less data, and animations run more smoothly. This should make a more noticeable impact on mobile devices. This website has always been pretty lean but now it’s even more snappy.
• Accessibility: Making Doppelkopf Club accessible for everyone is an important goal of mine. In the last few weeks I’ve made a few tweaks to improve the experience for users using screen readers.
• Player behavior: Slowly but surely this website is luring in more experienced players. I’ve received a lot of feedback telling me that the AI players make too many mistakes or simply play sloppy. I’ve collected all that feedback and started making small improvements. I’m planning a few more short-term fixes (especially announcements are in desperate need of improvement) and have cooked up a few plans to overhaul the AI player behavior in the mid-term so they become more nuanced and sophisticated.
• Community features: The most work went into building out the foundation for future community features. I’m currently working on functionality that allows players to create profiles, track and analyse their games, connect with other players. I was busy provisioning servers and databases, building sign-up and sign-in flows and more. I’ll continue working on this in the next few weeks and hope that I can announce something bigger before the end of the year.

More Players, More Games, More Feedback

I’m incredibly happy that more and more players (and those who want to learn) find their way to Doppelkopf Club. This website is steadily climbing in search engine rankins and shows up in AI chatbot recommendations more and more frequently. This means more visitors who learn the game and practice using the browser game. Visitors are playing more games than ever before and in August we passed the 600.000 games threshold.

At the same time I’m receiving more and more feedback via email and I love reading it. A lot of players have taken the time to simply say “thank you” or provide constructive feedback and share new ideas.

I’m proud to see this kind of growth. Doppelkopf Club is a passion project and I put in a lot of work and thoughts into building this website. Seeing more and more people enjoying this website is super fun and keeps me going.

Improved Card Design

A small improvement just arrived that I’d like to highlight:

I keep getting feedback that the design of our cards isn’t perfect. Some of you have trouble reading cards, especially discerning clubs and spades seems to be tricky. Others miss the usual pictures on king, queen, and jack cards. Others would love to play with German suits over French suits. All of those are good points that I keep looking into but not all of them are as easy to address.

When it comes to designing our cards, there are a few challenges I need to keep in mind:

• Cards need to work in different sizes: From large desktop screens all the way to tiny smartphones.
• They need to work for all players, no matter if they’ve got super sharp or impaired vision.
• The smartphone layout of the game needs to work in portrait mode (let’s be honest, turning your smartphone into landscape mode is just tedious and lame, isn’t it?). That’s why the maximum size for our cards is massively restricted.

These requirements present quite a challenge. I’m currently trying to keep the card design very minimal. Real playing cards come at a size of roughly 59 x 91 millimeters. At Doppelkopf Club I’ve got 72 z 108 pixels on large screens and about 40 x 60 pixels on small ones. Depending on the screen resolution that’s about 25 millimeters. Pictures look fancy but aren’t readable at these small sizes. Simulating the look of real playing cards just doesn’t work as well at these tiny sizes.

Today I made a few tiny tweaks. Nothing major, but the legibility of our cards should be a bit better now. Suits (clubs, spades, hearts, diamonds) now look the same on all devices - they used to be rendered slightly differently depending on your browser and operating system. I also increased the symbols on our cards and used the available space a little better.

You have to look closely to notice a difference on large devices:

On small devices the changes are a little more noticeable:

That’s all I’ve got for today. Keep the feedback coming. And most importantly: Keep having fun out there.

Ham

Titelbild: Smithsonian on Unsplash