PlaySuite
PlaySuite is a freeware reference application for GUI.Forms: one highly efficient native suite of individually interactive microprograms for Windows, Mac and Linux, built on a retained control tree, that opens on a walnut shelf of individually packaged games and curios. Behind the shelf is a framework with carefully hand-developed engines useful for game development and content representation. Each game is a folder, so adding one is easy.
Behind the shelf
PlaySuite is one program on GUI.Forms, and its games are built from shared engines rather than each carrying its own. One renderer, in two and three dimensions, serves every game that draws its own pixels. Its rule is to do less work, not the same work faster: still layers are kept as pixels with their depth, only what moved is redrawn, and each pixel is written once, in the window’s own byte order, at the display’s own resolution. A game behind the shelf stops its timers, workers and sound, and a settled game schedules no frame at all, so an open, untouched game uses nearly no processor.
The materials are generated when they are first shown. The card tables are fibre-rendered cloth: thousands of fibres, each a chain of capsules, lit with a hair-shading model so the baize has real pile, sheen and shadow. It is the Fabric Lab renderer from Plan Paint. Lawns are grown blade by blade, with no repeats, in spring, late-summer or frost weather, and the help pages are printed on generated paper. Stillwater, Nature Cube, Koi-Koi and Mowing are living 3D scenes drawn by the processor alone, with no GPU, inside a measured budget.
The cards have their own engine of rules, solver and graded deal tables, so every Solitaire, Spider and FreeCell deal is verified winnable before it is dealt. Rock Stack weighs and balances every stone in its own deterministic rigid-body engine. Mowing’s mower is driven by a small path-planning brain that is told only the size of its field and learns the rest. The music is written as code, in a synthesizer and sequencer made for the suite with no third-party libraries, and recorded sound is decoded by stx_vorbis, GUI.Forms’ own Vorbis decoder, with bounded BFFT synthesis.
Adding a game
A game is one folder holding everything about it: its identity on the shelf, its code, cover, help, tests and description. The shelf is discovered from those folders, so adding a game is adding a folder, and every engine above is there to build on. Anyone can contribute one by pull request. Each pull request is built and tested on Windows, macOS and Linux, and checked for its size and for what its code can reach. The rules, a template and the submission check are in the games repository.
The shelf
Solitaire
Classic Klondike on billiard felt, drawing one card or three. Every deal at Easy, Medium and Hard is verified winnable before it reaches you, and a finished game ends with the bouncing-card cascade.
Spider
Ten columns with one, two or four suits: complete eight king-to-ace runs of a single suit. Deals are verified winnable at every difficulty.
FreeCell
Four free cells, every card face up, and nothing hidden but the plan. PlaySuite deals only verified winnable games, graded Easy, Medium and Hard.
Hearts
Hearts against three opponents named for US presidents. They track the cards played and guess at hidden hands; each hand one is sharp and one is forgetful. Pass, dodge the points, or shoot the moon.
Sudoku
Fresh, unique puzzles generated offline at three difficulties, with pencil notes, digit highlighting and a night mode. Top scores rank by fewest mistakes.
Gems
Faceted stones that pour in, breathe, follow the pointer when dragged and shatter. Line them up to make bombs, stars and hypercubes, with shockwaves, star beams and cascade call-outs.
Nature Cube
A block of dark glass with three playable faces of mirrored tiles reflecting a lake, after the Flash classic 3D Logic. Join each coloured pair with lines that fold across the cube’s edges, around walls of mossy stone and through linked portals; Hard boards are measured by a solver to have one true way through.
Untangle
Yarn on a tufted cushion: drag the pegs until no thread crosses another of its colour. Frozen pegs and a cat who helps, hinders and finally naps in the finished web.
Atom Probe
Fire beams into a sealed, fogged chamber and read where they come out. Four atoms hide inside; deduce exactly where, for the fewest points.
Four Pegs
Crack the Curator’s secret code of four coloured pegs in ten tries, reading the gold pins and white rings after every guess.
Switchbox
She lives in the box, and those are her switches. Find the secret order that lights all six lamps; flip the wrong one and every lamp goes dark.
Play the browser demo
Puzzle Solve
Turn and flip glass pieces to rebuild a blue and yellow design. Every design is cut from a real tiling of squares, octagons, hexagons and more, from four-piece lessons to twelve-piece puzzles, and any arrangement with the same colours counts.
Eggy
Help a duckling climb the Very, Very Tall Mountain. Steer him or let him climb on his own; he never gives up, and keeps climbing while the game is closed.
Koi-Koi
The Japanese flower-card game, with 48 new woodblock-style card faces. Match the months, collect scoring sets, and decide when to stop or risk another turn with koi-koi.
The Paradoxiary
Parrots settle through a jungle grown inside a Victorian glasshouse. One or two of them lie, two tell the truth, and the rest only chatter about the weather. Talk to the birds, find out who is playing, and name the culprit by reasoning alone.
Liar’s Dice
Bluffing dice in a pirate tavern. Read a crew with their own habits and tells, raise the bid, or call their bluff, and keep the Keeper’s jar from swallowing your dice.
Pen the Sheep
Place fences one at a time while a sheep looks for the way out. Dozy, clever and cunning sheep each think differently; pen them at or under par for three stars.
Rock Stack
Work a little crane beside a brook to stack river stones as high as they will stand. Every rock is generated, weighed and balanced by a real physics simulation.
Explore the physics engine
Catching Thieves
Push pumpkins over the burrows before the raccoon bandits raid the bear’s garden. Short lessons teach the rules; Easy, Medium and Hard gardens are grown fresh and proven solvable, and a chorus of cheeky raccoons reacts to every push.
Maze 95
A first-person maze in the style of an old screensaver: brick corridors, ceiling flips, portals, a rolling marble and corridor visitors. Find the reward, maze after maze, or leave it be and watch it find its own way.
Stillwater
A living aquarium to leave running: tetras over swaying grass, a coral reef of tangs and clownfish, or a dim river pool under tree roots, all under shifting sunlit caustics, with an island band improvising on lap steel and ukulele. Tap the glass to scatter the fish.
Mowing
Eggy mows the garden on a ride-on mower, striping the lawn on his own. Take the wheel if you like, but keep off the flower beds or the old lady comes after you, and watch out for the gnome peeking from the grass.
Tumbled Stones
A tray of polished stones, each one of a few shapes cut from any mineral: obsidian, walnut, agate, lapis, bone. Turn them over and round until neighbours lie exactly the same way, and build the one great pull you promised at the start, in as few moves as you can.
TriPeaks
Three peaks of cards over a single waste: play any open card one rank above or below it, king and ace side by side, and keep a run going as long as you can. Every deal can be won, and each card of a run sounds a step higher than the last.
Pocket Library
A bookcase of 472 books, from the Bible, the Talmud and the lexicons to Plato, Darwin, Dickens, Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Oz, each set as a printed book on the paper you choose and opened to the page you left.
Canopy Falls
A jungle waterfall to leave running: one great curtain of water pouring over a basalt cliff into a clear lily pool, seen from a walkway high in the rainforest, every drop and glint of it made as it falls, the sun high over the brink. The roar, the forest’s birds and frogs, and a softly stroked harp are all made as they play.
Download
PlaySuite is freeware under the PLAYSUITE Source-Available License: free to play, study and share unmodified, with no derivatives or commercial use. No account is needed to play.
Windows x64
Windows installer, or a portable ZIP: open PlaySuite/games.exe.
Apple silicon Mac
macOS 15 or newer. Signed ad hoc, not notarized.
Linux x64
Ubuntu 24.04 or compatible, with X11.
Linux ARM64
Ubuntu 24.04 or compatible, with X11.