#chessworld

Although Chessworld is complete and work on it has ended (at least for now), it’s still quite incomplete - it certainly wouldn’t be suitable for a public release. A lot of work needs to be done in almost every department.

Gameplay: Chessworld is sorely missing any real kind of balance. We implemented some semblance of balance from the start, but it was on based on how we thought the game would play in theory. Actually playing the game as it is today makes this abundantly obvious, and renders the game almost unplayable. Players gather resources way too quickly, pieces don't move far enough or attack with enough power, players start with too much wood, and more. 

Pieces: Some individual pieces seem to lack purpose, too - the bishop seems rather useless, with its low attack and defense strength, and its lack of special ability. At the very least, I think it should be made cheaper, or given a boost in stats, and possibly the ability to heal surrounding pieces. The rook also seems to be lacking in power - considering how it looks, and the fact that it can't attack while moving, I think it should have a much higher attack strength.

Sound: The sounds in Chessworld were admittedly a little rushed, but they are mostly placeholders. Ideally, I'd like to record actual sound effects and implement them, to make the game feel truly unique and whole. The generated chiptune sound effects seem a little out of place with the rest of the game’s aesthetic. Some actions are also lacking in sound effects - for example, attacking the king makes no noise whatsoever, leaving the player unsure if the attack even worked

Visuals: As happy as I am with the models, they probably need some work. I'd love to take the time to go back to some of the pieces I worked on earlier and update them with the techniques I learned while working on the latter pieces. They also desperately need to be animated. How amazing would it be to actually see each individual piece walk around the planet with moving legs? And it would be so great to actually see the pieces move to make their attacks! Imagine the Queen really shooting a fireball, and the Knight really swinging a sword in a 360 degree arc. This could bring a lot to the game experience. Similarly, I also should make the pieces’ “breathing” an animation, rather than making it happen through code (which sort of kills the processing and in turn, the frame rate, since the computer needs to run all sorts of calculations to make it happen). The GUI also needs some work - it doesn't scale itself according to the resolution used by the player, and it doesn't look as good as I know it could, in general. 

Polish: There are some little things which need fixing, too. Players should be able to click on an opponent’s piece at any time to check their health, not only when selecting a piece for attack. We also desperately need keyboard shortcuts to encourage faster moves, and simply ease of access as well. I also think pieces should “truly” find their way to their destination tiles, moving seamlessly from tile to tile along the best possible route, rather than simply moving through other pieces and obstacles in a straight line to get to their destination. But that’s just me.

Developing both Q-Bot and Chessworld has left me thinking a lot about the amount of time it takes to accomplish different goals in game development. While working on each project, I was surprised to find that the things I expected to take a long time to finish tended to get done within, say, a couple hours, while the things I expected to take no time at all would almost always end up taking up the better part of a week to get to a working state. This sort of dissonance between expectation and reality can cause some real problems when it comes to project time management, and was one of the main reasons we slipped on a few of our goals for Chessworld.

Here is a video showing Chessworld in all its glory.

The video should cover most of the gameplay, but in case you missed it, it goes something like this:

Players play as either White or Black. Each player has a king, which is positioned at either pole on the planet of Chessworld.

The King acts a sort of factory, building pieces for the player. Players can start by building some pawns which they can use to gather wood for the King. Pawns move to trees, retrieve wood, and bring it back to their king while the player’s opponent takes their turn. This system means that the longer a player takes to complete their turn, the more wood their opponent is able to gather - this means players naturally strive to make their turns as short as possible, eliminating the need for any kind of “timer”.

A player’s king uses their wood to build new pieces, each with their own abilities. Queens can move far and throw firebombs, setting fire to an area for a number of turn. The fire can burn down trees and inflict damage on any piece in the area. They also have high attack, but are very expensive.

Bishops are scouts, able to move far, but with low attack and defense. Knights can’t move as far, but are stronger, and have an attack which allows them to inflict damage on all opponents immediately around them. Rooks can not move very at all and cannot attack while packed up, but can “unpack” to change to attack mode, where they can attack at a range with high power.

The first piece I made for Chess World was the pawn. You can probably tell I was still very new to Blender when I designed this one.

I decided on a low-poly aesthetic early on in development both because I have a personal love for the art style (largely thanks to spending many hours playing the Nintendo 64 as a kid, and also thanks to the work done over at /r/lowpoly on Reddit), and due to the technical simplicity and time restraints.

The legs (and really, the whole design) were inspired by the legs of the titular castle in the Studio Ghibli movie, Howl’s Moving Castle, of which I am a big fan. I envisioned the chess pieces scuttling around the board on insect-like legs right from the beginning, so I was eager to keep that element to the design.

For my class’s second assignment, we were asked to create a tile-based strategy game, in which we were to implement pathfinding. On a walk from campus to the shopping center a few blocks away after class, my teammates and I threw around some concepts for some creative approaches to the brief. Eventually, I proposed the idea of a race of “sentient chess pieces”, and a game which plays like Chess on a spherical board - a planet, if you will. I brought it up sort of in jest, but to my surprise, the other guys loved it. We thought about it more and more, fleshing out the gameplay and aesthetic over lunch, and agreed there and then that we had found our game. We drafted up a development plan and over the week leading up to the assignment’s start, we divided the responsibilities and assigned them according to our given preferences.

Following a rocky beginning due to my being extremely sick and bed-ridden with some kind of everlasting bronchitis/flu hybrid, the game started to take shape. Certain elements changed over time, either due to restraints caused by a lack of experience and sometimes lack of time management, but at its core, it was exactly what I'd suggested weeks prior: chess in outer space.

Personally, I was in charge of the aesthetics, such as the models and GUI, and I shared half the responsibility for the core game design. Asher and I had some long discussions about the roles of each piece within the game, their price (we would be implementing a resource-gathering system where players exchange gathered wood for new units) and their abilities. I was faced with a slight challenge: I had agreed to design and produce 3D models for the pieces, and I’d never touched a 3D modelling program before in my life. Luckily, I had a great resource at my fingertips: my girlfriend had created Q-Bot’s model for me, and she had learnt a great deal about Blender in the process, so she was able to set me on the right path. Before too long, I was whipping up great-looking sentient Chess-pieces in a matter of hours.

Unfortunately, time did not allow me to learn Blender animation, so that skill will need to come to me in the future. I had been intending to bring the pieces to life by making them walk, spider-like, around the world, but sacrifices needed to be made. Otherwise I might not have had time to put together anything resembling a half-professional GUI.

Once it came time to put the GUI together, I sort of came into my own. I’d picked up quite a few skills while designing the assets for my first ever University-level game, No One Is Lost (a sci-fi card/board game I designed and produced last year). I put together some nice, simple, aesthetically pleasing menus to display around the screen in Chess World, all the while following established design patterns to ensure the information players would want would be where they expected it to be on the screen - important information which would be used many times per turn would appear in the bottom right hand corner of the screen (such as piece stats and movement options), where western eyes are drawn thanks to the nature of the english language, while less important buttons such as “pause game” and “return [camera] to king” would appear in the bottom left. A button which would only ever be used once per turn, “end turn”, was to appear at the very bottom of the list of options appearing at the bottom left corner, to try and avoid players pre-emptively ending their turn by mistake. I took special care to ensure players would find the GUI’s layout comfortable and natural to use.

Oh boy, it’s been a busy few weeks. How long has it been since my last post? More than a month? Oops. I guess I've been busier than I thought.

A few things have happened since my last post. Q-Bot got finished and submitted, and I worked with a team of two other students to conceptualise, design, build and complete a slightly-too-ambitious title; Chess World. It’s been a bit of a ride.