Stardance Project

Devlog: Chess Game Design

After a long and tough development cycle I finally got the chess board to work! It was like climbing a mountain just getting all the pieces to show up on the board correctly.. The hard work paid off. Everything works as it should: all the pieces are the size and their positions are accurate.

Architecture and Class Breakdown

My game code uses object-oriented programming. The structure is broken down into two parts:

Piece Classes: Classes for each chess piece. Each piece has its movement rules, boundary checks and capture rules. For example Pawns, Knights, Bishops, Rooks, Queens and Kings all have rules.

The Board Class: The Board class the most difficult by far. It took a lot of time to get all the pieces to show up in the places.

Dealing with Layout

The development process had alignment problems. First I had to figure out the correct board size for screen resolutions. It was a headache. If there was any space around the grid it broke the rendering math. That made it hard to calculate coordinates.

When the board grid was fixed the piece sizes looked weird. I tried to scale the vector assets. It didn’t work. I decided to take an approach. I took a screenshot of chess pieces cut them into sprites and used those. It worked.

Future Plans (next devlog - finishing touches):

Next I’m planning on fitting the theme better with using chess puzzles (It just fits the theme more, like a puzzle fits with the other mini games more) Then I want to connect the minigames together like after finishing one level you go to next.

Devlog 2 -
After the first game in the project, this is now game number 2, it is a soccer penalty shooter where you drag on the ball the shoot into goal. Classes used were a ball class a balltrajectory class where you see where the ball will be able to shoot, a game manager class that controls every thing, then a goal class to show where the goal is inside goal outside miss. 5 goals you win 2 misses your out. Goalie class that tries to stop you and last just a UImanager that handles mostly everything you see on screen. Besides the background and other art.
How to play: Place your mouse on the ball and drag to aim, then try to score.

Devlog 1
First project is the 2D shooter. In this time the classes that were coded was the player, zombie, background, frame, bullets, health and health classes. There is also waves where if you beat the first level of zombies then you can move to the next. Along with that there are also waves. You can use wasd to move and the mouse to shoot. When the zombies spawn, on the top of the screen they will always walk towards you and point in your direction. The waves differ in speed and health. There is also a health bar so try staying alive! The picture is only the first wave, I don’t know how to add other pictures. But all the zombies and the player I created.