Dang, that's really fun! I think its solid all-around and no notes on the core game loop.
If you want to make it more accessible to folks like myself who stink at chess, I'd recommend adding some sort of power-ups so that you can take multiple pieces, jump over obstacles, or freeze enemies in place. And with that you probably have a great little game to sell on Steam :)
Great game. I love playing chess so this is quite a unique way to play it.
One piece of feedback: dragging a piece on mobile seems inaccurate at times. I’m used to chess apps where it works great. Here it seems the dragged piece doesn’t always end up where I’ve left my finger. I’ve lost a few rounds like this.
There must be something in the water! I’ve been working on a (very different) chess-like roguelike, and just released the demo. Check it out if you’re a fan of weird chess puzzles, bad chess puns, and Hnefatafl!
The AI can cheat, because it can move a blocking piece out of the way to then attack you in the same turn. Or maybe it's just something to keep in mind, but it caught me off guard.
That was me. The engine is deterministic so I wrote a beam solver for it. My score should've been 208 (pretty sure it could play forever; I capped the solver at a max time limit) but I messed up one of my moves (I was manually moving the pieces instead of submitting the final move list with curl).
I think it makes a pretty good assumption on understanding core chess rules, but yea that would be nice. The thing that did trip me up at first was not realizing the red and blue bishops were the same piece, I was wondering if I was missing something.
Interesting, reminds me of Really Bad Chess where the pieces change whether you win or lose. If you're really bad the game might give you all queens or rooks.
Looks like enemy movements are deterministic, wonder how feasible it is to script this. Was able to increase my score by 4 points trying alternate lines near the end
There is some polish with Claude over the past few weeks, but we wrote the engine over 10 years ago actually. Each piece moves using a modified version of A* to simply find the shortest path to Prince Chazz (the piece controlled by the player).
Your passkey login doesn't even work. I think the nature of Claude usage here goes a bit beyond "some polish".
(For reference, signing back in with a passkey seems to be impossible even after successfully creating an account with one. Every time you sign in it attempts to save a new passkey right after asking for the old one)
You probably don’t need A*, do you actually want the AI to move optimally? That would infer the game ends sooner. You could probably just use greedy heuristics
I think I found a mini bug. Say I do a score of 10. Then I change board. Then I die with score < 10. I still have 10 for that board. It makes it easy to cheat the leaderboard :) Fun game!
If you want to make it more accessible to folks like myself who stink at chess, I'd recommend adding some sort of power-ups so that you can take multiple pieces, jump over obstacles, or freeze enemies in place. And with that you probably have a great little game to sell on Steam :)
One piece of feedback: dragging a piece on mobile seems inaccurate at times. I’m used to chess apps where it works great. Here it seems the dragged piece doesn’t always end up where I’ve left my finger. I’ve lost a few rounds like this.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3856240/Pieces_of_the_Kin...
You just have to be lucky and stumble upon a sequence that allows you to surive.
The RNG is seeeded though, always same seed, so you can determinarically explore all moves and find some sequences that lead to higher scores.
Reminds me of Alice:
https://folklore.org/Alice.html
(which I played manically until I managed _1_ perfect game of --- still have the box/disk....)
One suggestion: some way to tell what the enemy pieces are? Maybe a legend to the right of the board? I ended up discovering by trial and error.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)
(For reference, signing back in with a passkey seems to be impossible even after successfully creating an account with one. Every time you sign in it attempts to save a new passkey right after asking for the old one)
Pawnbarian is more chess-inspired than a chess themed, but actually rogue(lite)-like and very good.
https://j4nw.com/pawnbarian/
Explanation of the pieces would be nice too!
This is great!