I love seeing work-in-progress screenshots. The great thing about keeping these screenshots is that after the game is finished, you can tell in retrospect which screenshots were significant and interesting. Pico-8 encourages screenshotting, with its built-in screenshot and gif capability. And the file size is minimal. ... So I figure a lot of folk probably have cool early screenshots of games that later become great games. So let's see 'em!

I'll start things off.

Here is my earliest screenshot of "Space Tavern Poker".

I like this screenshot, because this was the first moment I was sure the project was possible.

There's no betting implemented yet. No score-keeping of any kind. The only interactivity was a button that dealt the next card, and a button that started the hand over.

But what this does show is that each player could figure out what hand they had, and estimate (without cheating) the odds that they had the winning hand. They do this based only on their own cards, and the face-up cards.

The interesting, and slightly unintuitive thing is that the estimates never add up to 100%. Even if you account for the fact that there's no estimate for the player, they often are not even close to 100%. Why? Because these are the players' estimates, not the true odds of winning.

If two players just happen to both have four of a kind, they're both going to think their odds of winning are above 90%. But if all the players have nothing hands, they're all going to think their odds of winning are in the single digits. This is what makes poker interesting.

Like I said, when I got this working, I knew that the project would be possible, before that point I wasn't sure. So this was a happy point in the development.

This screenshot is boring as dirt, but it was important. This and a couple others like it were useful references.
I was crazy enough to code the game exclusively on Pico-8, but taking screenshots for reference doesn't count as cheating.