#Update 1:

  • Valid move constraint
  • better AI (valid moves with preference to capture valuable pices)
  • less annoying sounds
  • less dizzying camera options (instant turn, static)
  • mouse adjustment options

#Controls:

  • right-click and drag the mouse to look
  • right-click and scroll to zoom
  • M to open menu
  • left-click a tile with your piece to select it
  • left-click a tile to move your piece onto
  • space to toggle between normal view and top down view

#Rules:

  • Standard chess rules apply. They where bent where necessary.
  • Fancy moves aren't supported. Forget about "en passe" and "castling" (If you are wondering what that is you are lucky enough to not notice any difference)
  • Players play in clockwise order.
  • You loose when your king dies. You win when the other kings die.
  • There is no check mate, no draw (you can forfeit by clicking the flag in the upper left corner), no timeout, only death
  • The middle is a little funky, but you will figure it out on your own.

#Artificial "Intelligence"

  • Have you ever played chess with a five year old? Well lucky you! Today you will be playing against a polite three year old! Today you will verse a four year old! (They grow up so fast)
  • If you are not interested in this type of hell you better pick out two friends or surgically split your brain in three. Ether one is better than what you will endure if you continue.
  • To activate the AI just open the menu in game and check the "AI BROKEN" box. This is it. Enjoy what you chose.
  • Let me explain what the AI can and can't. It is a three year old, but it is a polite three year old.
  • The AI will wait for its turn. (You are the red guy btw, I picked you don't get a say in it although it would be very easy to implement)
  • The AI doesn't know how the pieces are supposed to move or what it's supposed to do, so it dose the next best thing, it picks a random valid field and just moves. What is that a rook? Don't mind if I place it on your king! I don't care that this is not how rooks move, I won by accident.
  • If you have any bright Ideas on how to map this hyperbolic chessboard onto a normal one (or one with euclidean coordinates), feel free to tell me, cause I don't know how to do that without manually writing all possible moves for all possible pieces on all possible fields. (I have neither the time nor the patience to do that) Little did past Voidsay know. Turns out he had the time and patience. Anyway suggestions are still welcome!
  • New: The AI knows how to move its pieces rule compliant.
  • New: The AI will prefer to attack valuable pieces. But as any four year old it searches for short term gratification. The queen can hit this random pawn? Better do it now. Oops, the queen is dead. Who could have seen that coming? In and off it self it's just an easy min max game. Unfortunately to fix this one I will have to rewrite core game systems. That's development baggage for you!

Made for the Miz Jam 1 using provided art asset.
https://kenney.nl/assets/bit-pack

Music is a snipped from Bach BWV 543 - Prelude and Fugue in A minor, which was rendered with Fruit Loops.
All other sound effects where made during the jam.


Some thoughts and remarks:

  • I usually don't work with sprites and Tile sheets. That one was a first for me. I probably made many mistakes and inelegant solutions, but it is what it is.
  • To make a passable AI would be rather simple. The problem for this game was the unusual board, which made it difficult to apply the usual grid approach. Reading some Wiki articles on hyperbolic space and hyperbolic coordinates (off the clock) didn't really help. If only there was a simple way to determine the valid moves... everything else could be done in minutes, but sadly I am already out of time anyway.
  • I feel like the sound on the webgl build is worse than on my original build. I don't know if it is just me.
  • The default color scheme is really cool. I will be using some dark purple and other dark colors more often.
  • When will I learn to stop doing too ambitious things? Probably never, but I will try to make a super simple, straight forward game for my next jam.
  • Dose anyone actually care about the source code? It's a mess and it will be a mess to upload to github. I would rather not.
  • Btw what is up with Miziziziz? Are you guys trying to beat the polish record for most useless Z's in a word?


StatusPrototype
PlatformsHTML5, Windows, macOS, Linux
Rating
Rated 4.0 out of 5 stars
(2 total ratings)
AuthorVoidsay
GenreStrategy
Made withBlender, FL Studio, Unity, Audacity, GIMP
TagsChess, hyperbolic, Local multiplayer, non-eucledian
Average sessionAbout a half-hour
LanguagesEnglish
InputsKeyboard, Mouse
MultiplayerLocal multiplayer
Player count1 - 3

Download

Download
Windows_ItTakes3.zip 24 MB
Download
Linux_ItTakes3.zip 28 MB
Download
Mac_ItTakes3.zip 25 MB

Install instructions

Download the correct zip file and unpack it somewhere. Inside you will find the appropriate executable.

Development log

Comments

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I can't click on the tiles for some reason?

Should work. When you select a piece arrows should appear above the tiles that you can move to. It might be hard to hit them from perspective view. If you press space you can switch to top down. I would also recommend setting the camera mode to "static" in the menu.

I’m not a huge fan of the graphics but I like the idea.

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why cant you castle with your king but you can castle with your queen

why is the view not top down

You can press space to switch to top down view. If you don't like the turning you can also turn off rotation in the menu.

I love the atmosphere of the little room you've created there, impressive given the art pack you had to work with. I seem to be able to do all kinds of illegal moves (moving pieces through each other) but well done on getting it working at all!

I appreciate the recognition.

There is a way to lock the moves, but it was too labor intense for me. Basically go thru all 96 tiles and make a list of all adjacent tiles marking them as above, below, to the left, to the right and have a recursive algorithm go thru it all to create a new list with all possible moves and lock all others. This would also make the AI play fair.

I approached it wrong in the planing phase. You only see the error in your way when you have to actually implement what you thought up. The diagonal moves really messed with my whole logic, because it makes a big difference for your final position whether a move to the top right is defined as moving up and then right or moving right and then up.

This is so fkn neat. The camera sensitivity is a lil high and I kinda wish the turning was faster

Yeah I forgot to add a mouse sensitivity slider. Didn't want to make the turning faster, because it was already dizzying, perhaps an other slider could solve that?

Maybe. An option to disable turning in top down mode could also be nice.