Intresting idea, i think the story mode is way too easy, would be nice to see it vs another player, maybe it just needs to have some "cooldowns" on a piece, because this way i was able with quick movements and the rook to basically tear down the entire enemy line :D

I second that - there should be some way to ramp up the difficulty. Also, the control matters a lot here too - with a touchpad the opponents are reasonably difficult but with a real mouse it's easy to mow them down.

Though thought it was nice (IDK if this was explicitly coded in or just happened) how the AI would immediately take your piece sometimes if you moved into danger. Just running around with a rook generally worked but I did get punished a few times when I got careless.

Thanks @andreadbx and @siimphh for playing. The AI can clear the board in a millisecond if I set it high enough. I purposely made it easy for the compo version so players of all abilities/ableness can finish the story to rate the game. If there's any interest I'll do a post compo version with much harder AIs. :8ball:

The presentation is amazing, the graphics are pretty damn crisp and clean and the music soothing. Was this game made in 1 weekend?

Also what art software are you currently using?

Thanks @matt-pattabhi the game was indeed made in a weekend. The Chess gameplay came together really quickly so as I had some extra time I added in the story.

I'm not an artist at all so I'm very flattered by your comments. I used Clip Studio Paint for the art.

I was lucky enough to see the early version of this during development over the weekend. Beyond the insanity of the premise, the pun-heavy story really drives home the theme and adds a lot of tongue-in-cheek gravitas. The mechanics could give rise to all kinds of possibilities, such as multiple advancing pawns in lock-step, symmetrical moves and of course it could be made infinitely more difficult at the press of a button, but how much is anyone going to get into a game in 72 hours? This game's great, it should be the next big eSport.

This is amazing! Love everything about it. Nailed it.

This is a cool little game - I don't see a box to rate the audio for it, though? Which seems a shame

This was FANTASTIC! Really amazing and great fun! superb music, love the writing and the game style was refreshing! really impressed 5/5 from me.

Haha this was great! Chess has never been so frantic. Although I did end up pretty much focusing on a single piece (usually the queen) to do most of the work. I thought about if you at least should need to force the king into a check mate to win but maybe that would take away from the idea and flow of the game. Anyway, great entry and the story was a nice touch!

Loved story mode! Surprisingly fun game, didn't think real time chess would be so fun XD

I beat the final boss https://i.imgur.com/W5wOtHa.png

holy crap this was the most fun I've had playing an LD entry so far

It was really easy to win once I got the hang of it, but still fun

This is amazing ! That's a great idea, and the story mode is really funny. Since it was pretty easy in normal mode I tried in formidable, I couldn't beat the first enemy ! That is definitly a game I want to play again even when the LD will be over.

How did you do to code the IA ?

Loved it! Everything was done well, gameplay, graphics, audio, story are all great.

Also like the story very much, it's rare to see so much polish in a game made in such a short time!

Awesome idea, super sweet name and so on. Gotta love it!

There are just some balancing issues. Against AI at least (if kept at a level where it doesn't finish in a blink of an eye), it's just too easy to move one pawn out of the way and just go ham with the queen always winning with just three or four moves. And I'm not quite sure if there is a way to fix that either. Maybe if you'd restrict the movement of the same piece over and over again (but that'd kinda go against normal chess rules) so you couldn't move the same piece again before the opponent has done a move.

The story mode was great and the characters were nicely designed and super charming. Would have loved to see that style more incorporated to the actual game instead of just having a generic chess board setup. Like have the player/opponent character artworks on the sides along the lines of Super Puzzle Fighter or Tetris Attack.

Good job! Can't even imagine what kind of a huge tanglement of fingers it would be to play thing against a human on a touch device...

@polegar The AI runs through all possible moves it can make and rates them on various criteria; threatened, captures, etc. The move with the highest rating is the move it makes. Even though it's a brute force approach it's still pretty quick. The 'Impossible' difficulty is it working at full speed. :8ball:

@antti-haavikko Great comments. Thanks for taking the time. I do have a couple of ideas on how to curtail, but not eliminate, using a single piece to blitz an opponent. They involve allowing the player to see the AI dragging his pieces to make it fair though, and that would take a rewrite of the code. If I can find some time I might give it a go.

I totally agree about the Chess part not reflecting the characters. Originally I wanted to have a different Chess sets for each character you play that echoed that character in some way. But alas I ran out of time. :8ball:

Well done. Good story, well worked out. Good mood also ! i liked it a lot.

Damn, your game puts my (also chess) game to shame. The chess rules took me whole Saturday and a good part of Sunday, and you managed to do that plus story, music and good art. Well done!

I love chess and this game really surprised me. IGreat it was succeeded to encourage classical mechanics.. Good visual style and music. I love this game :diamonds:

This is pure genius! Also the smooth jazz music creates a fantastic "noir" mood together with the frantic gameplay and the chess gangster story.

Also, traditional Chess opening **and** endgame knowledge is mostly useless, because there is never tempo or Zugzwang, kind of like how all ideas about life-and-death, shape and influence in Go is go out the indow if white takes two turns, then black takes two.

And that's great!

Interesting idea! I actually do like chess but despite having a really fancy, hand-crafted physical board and all, I never seem to play it. This was a fun twist on it.

The easiest setting was a breeze where I could win almost every time by just moving the same one pawn right up to the king, but obviously you thought of that as you introduced a lot more difficulty levels! I guess it would've been interesting to see the difficulty be based more on different approaches to strategy and less on ramping up the speed tho since it just feels unfair when the opponent is moving at a superhuman speed, but I guess that's difficult to pull off in a jam.

Based on your response with regards to AI above I guess you actually implemented it all by yourself rather than using a chess engine? Very impressive in that case! Nice job!