Midterm Chess Game Vlog transcripted

Note: This is a transcript of the development vlog I had for my midterm project.

Oct 12^th: I decided to start a long-term project of a turn-based chess game. For reference, it will look like Fire Emblem, Super Robot Wars, Yggdra Union, etc.

Oct 17-18^th: I started examining the best way to procedurally generate map and units for the game. I’ve decided that UI canvas would be the best approach since there will be event trigger and RectTransformUtility. It is planed that the game can be both keyboard-only or mouse only maneuver. I plan to do the mouse first, then think about how to adapt the system for keyboard and controller.

Oct 20^th: Due to time and scheduling, the project for now will be a basic chess game with well fleshed out scripts and utilities.

The focus will be:

• The basic unit script, which will contain all crucial functions for a unit, and will be inherited by all sorts of specific units
• The map generating, which will be as flexible as possible in order to generate different maps for different levels.
• The unit management, containing functions that will iterate through multiple units and create specific events for units.
• Details and rules specific for chess, which will be noted and modified in later stages of development.

Oct 24^th: I underestimated the complexity of the unit and had to delete several specific units and started a repo to redo everything. I recreated and optimized the board generator since its original hard-coded script had bug and conflicted with the unit manager.

Oct 25^th: Fixed the movement of the chess piece and they could do basic moves, but still need to check for out of bounds situations and whether there is enemy around.

Oct 26^th: Fixed the event trigger and enable the drag & drop mechanism.

              Fixed the tile status, there won’t be any out of bounds error any more for the tiles

Oct 27^th: Completed the rules of specific chess pieces. Added sound effects. Added sprites for the pieces.

Feedback from playtest:

• Indication for which turn is it. This WILL be a later update where I would add visual aids in the UI layer telling the player that which faction’s turn it is, such as the protagonist turn would be a blue symbol and blueish UI in general, and the enemy and third party would be represented by other colors, such as red and yellow. But I’ll first add a basic indicator in TextMeshPro, which will be called by the SwitchTurn function.
• More representative chess sprite instead of all roundish. Yes, that was sort of a troll I added. Those where the chess piece of Chinese Chess, and the sprites will be updated and replace by specific mini characters such as in RPG games. They will have some idle animations such as walking, breathing on the map tiles.