https://store.steampowered.com/app/3856240/Pieces_of_the_Kin...
Here are two resources I found quite helpful...
Start here: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/intro...
Or if you're impatient like me you click "Your first 2D game" or "Your first 3D game" in the left bar (whichever you prefer) and go through that -- and skipping back to the intro/step by step when you don't understand something.
By the end of that you'll have made your first game.
From there you just do something extra to it. Mix it up. Start a new project with a different (small) idea. Build small projects until small becomes medium becomes large.
Just like learning anything else, really.
I find this kind of behaviour disgusting. Why don't you do a Show HN on your own?
So far I've played Shotgun Queen and Pawnbarian. There's also Ouroboros King, Demoncrawl, The Rookery, Passant, Chess Survivors, Gambonanza, Mind over Monarchy, and many more.
The mechanic is fairly simple for this board game (not computer/video): A standard chessboard and chess pieces are used, with a custom deck of cards for each player. Before moving any pieces, a card is revealed that effects enhancements/restrictions/story/etc. The selling point would be banking on the creativity of the deck, of course. If there is anybody that could run with this idea (if in fact original, which I doubt) before I do, I'd love to hear about 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.
After that, I tested a few solvers. Single Player Monte Carlo Tree Search seemed promising, but didn't do as well as I expected. A simple beam search does appear to go infinitely pretty easily.
Actually, Gambonanza kind of reminds me of Balatro in that way: start out with rules resembling the standard game, end up with some very weird combinations. Not really my cup of tea, but might be of interest to others.
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.
What I mean is as a player, I'll likely not notice the difference in a Friday puzzle vs a Thursday puzzle. And I can replay to my hearts content anyway. So why not simply randomize the board on each replay? Which I'd do anyway.
I think both "play styles" make sense, we've just found it more fun to share with friends this way!
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 suggestion...it's unclear to me why I would sign up. Maybe offer a few details so I know why I would sign up for this.
Took me a minute to understand what was going on, but after that it clicked. Would be fun to see more piece-inspired mechanics added over time.
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.
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 is to have all enemy pieces move simultaneously. I expected that the losing condition is that I am threatened and there are no unthreatened squares to move (checkmate).
However, since the opponents move one-at-a-time, I found that even if I moved to a safe square, sometimes I could be both threatened and captured in the same move! Which is somewhat different from normal chess, since now you have to consider the possible orders in which the opponents move. So even moving to unthreatened squares could be a game over.
There are so many of these, wow - and nicely distinct from each other, too
One tiny UI nitpick: I found the squares' hitboxes to be unintuitively small, requiring more-than-expected precision to get Chazz to land in the square I wanted. (I was initially confused about whether I was making an illegal move.) You might want to either increase the size of the squares, or make the "this square is the target" indicator more obvious.
Were you able to rig up the solver to the running game?
Curious what this looks like!
Beam search can be googled for useful results, beam solver can not.
Do you have any content on how you built it? I also enjoy making web-based games and would love to learn about other people's processes!
(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)
The passkey feedback is good though, I see a few more people have had issues with it. I'll have a look at fixing it!
https://play.date/games/questy-chess/
Pretty unique and interesting...
Pawnbarian is more chess-inspired than a chess themed, but actually rogue(lite)-like and very good.
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So far I've played Shotgun Queen and Pawnbarian. There's also Ouroboros King, Demoncrawl, The Rookery, Passant, Chess Survivors, Gambonanza, Mind over Monarchy, and many more.
There was even a Humble Bundle for mostly Chess-inspired indie roguelikes.
https://www.humblebundle.com/games/checkmate-chess-games-col...
I think it's pretty obvious, tbh. Traditional roguelikes are turn-based, take place on a square grid, are good vehicles for exploring focused mechanical ideas, and can be fun without much in the way of story or graphic design. All of those features mesh well with the rules of chess, which itself is probably the most widely played game in the world.