Checkers Devlog

Hello everyone, this is my new devlog for Checkers. I took a break from my projects but now im back. Checkers is a very fun game to play with friends and family. However. I want to add a unique arcade spin to it. Letting the player earn points from jumping pieces, becoming king and adding some cool retro animations to it. Everyone is welcome to give advice to make this game come to life.

Simplify the complexity

To start off, I actually was a bit intimidated working on a project like this. It has a lot of challenges and can be very complex depending on the how you make it. For me, I do want my checker game to be a bit advance but simple to enjoy. I started breaking down the game on how to approach it and start off by simply making the board, the pieces and the instance variables that I will need to help me figure out how the pieces will move, get selected, jumped, etc. In editor I made these 4 colored objects called "SpaceCheck" to help my pieces detect if square is empty, move to, jump enemy or invalid to move or jump over. Yellow and Green indicates to move forward while blue and red indicates to move back once piece becomes King.

I've gotten the piece to move so far in the eventsheet as well. I will focus on getting the pieces to move to the "SpaceCheck" objects so I can work on moving into the transitioning of getting the "SpaceChecks" to appear when player click on any of the red pieces.

I like games with simple and minimalist graphics but entertaining mechanics. Thanks for sharing your progress in this game.

Thanks. I like the simplicity but love entertaining mechanics as well. I just love the retro style era of games. My inspirations.

Project Update-2.1

This is a minor update related to the previous things I discussed about in Update-2 post.

I will need to let the code know where my piece is on the board and somehow detect the two squares above. I took out the "spacechecks" objects as well because I think...

I decided to reused the "Spacechecks" objects (the small yellow, green. blue and red squares) for my game because it actually helped me detect only the two squares above as intended in the event sheet. Now, I will focus on making it detect other pieces to determine if the player can click on that square if it's valid to move on.

I also added detail to the crown giving it a red ruby in the center of it as the previous crown looked bland without it on the pieces. Last I moved the HUD texts more closer to board as it was a bit too far out.

Project Update-2.2

Happy Friday everyone. Hope everyone is enjoying their day or projects your eager to work on as I am with my project.

For this update, I worked on valid and invalid move for the pieces. To start, I set up my event to detect if square is occupied with the "spacecheck" sprite object, highlighting it red to let the player know the square is not optional to click to. Once I set that I up, I added another event to prevent that player from clicking on that square, so if they do click on it, nothing happens.

Piece is able to detect if it can move to valid square.

What I learned

Im very happy of how things are going with this project. It's fun and im understanding more on how to use booleans variables. I have better understanding with instance variables as well, I learned a bit about understanding the 2D grid and positioning of the board.

To end this update. I will probably work on getting the red pieces to detect the white pieces. Or I will work on getting the "SpaceChecks" to update their position where the mouse is over a checker piece and when it clicks on that piece, it will set its position around it.

Project Update-2.3

Previous Update

Hi everyone! I'm back with an update of how my checker game is turning out. In the previous update, I talked about getting the red piece to detect the forward squares above. 1)To detect if there's currently another red piece in forward square to make it invalid to move in it. 2)To move to valid square if free.

Current Update

In this update, I made the red piece detect if there's a white piece, highlighting it blue, and able to jump it if the space behind it is available.

Jumping white piece

As you can see in the pics, the red piece is highlighted and is able to jump over the white piece to its targeted square.

I added additional sprites called "SpaceJump". those are the outer mini squares(circled in red) surrounding the inner mini squares named "SpaceMove". These will help me bring my project together to be able to jump multiple pieces and allow me to setup the "jump animation" for the pieces in the event sheet.

Next Update

My next update will make the red piece being able to detect invalid jumps, setup Jump Animation, Space Moves and Space Jump location update after selected piece has moved, and finally, allowing the player to end turn when player moves, and all possibilities of jumping is final. See you all in the next update.

A minor update of the progress for the jumping animation. I used the tween behavior to make my piece jump over the opponent.

Project Update-2.4

Checker Detectors Updated

Hey everyone, just giving a quick update on the project. To start off, I was able to update my move and jump detectors (Look at gif below).

When it comes to jumping another however, I will need to add more steps to it because if the piece is doing multiple jumps, it will need to be able to detect that instead of ending on turn. So that's what I'm currently working on at the moment.

New Ideas

Aside from that, I thought of some new ideas. This is mainly for Tournament Mode, but I might give the player(s) the option of selecting a color theme for their pieces and the game board. These options will be giving to the player(s) by achieving a certain score in Tournament Mode and rewarding the player by unlocking the color theme once score is achieved. Here are a few color themes I made. This is just an idea, but I may make it into the game along with more variants of other colors.

War

Mellow

Classic

Circus

Project Update-2.5

Previous Update

Hey everyone, I'm back with another update! But before I get into it, I'll give a quick recap of the last one. So I last left off with getting my "spacemovers" and "spacejumper" objects to update their position when a piece jumps another piece. I mentioned that a lot of other additional steps needs to be added for the piece to make multiple jumps and that's where I am now.

Current Update

There has been some great progress for this project for getting the checker piece to jump and to be able to detect more additional jumps after jumping. Right now, I'm doing some debugging to get the piece to properly make multiple jumps. You can take a look at the video below to see what I mean.

Next Update

But once I get the debugging resolved, I can finally complete the mechanic movements for the player and can work on setting up the Ai mechanics for the CPU! This will be a new area of the project, officially starting update 3! Stay tuned and see you all on the next update!