Played two runs and both times had to give up on the second island because I ended up in a situation neither player could win. I like the concept but how it's played out leaves a lot to be desired.
Cool! Quite a few bugs I noticed from there that nobody had reported so far. And some of them like the event choice cancel button being visible all the time, even after accepting the deal seemed to happen consistently too.
One thing you probably didn't realize since all your wins were flawless was is that you can kinda freely sac your units to bait the AI which speeds up flow quite a bit. The lost pieces are revived after each level so you don't lose anything that way.
Thanks for making a video! ❤️ Always useful to see someone play your games to spot out the possible pain points and issues.
Wow that's a lot of moves on that queen. Do you mean how to beat that boss without a pawn? There is still a way since enemies also die when they don't have any valid moves.
if a piece with the moon gets defeated by justice during the pre turn,the game crashes. for this the player must only have 1 piece with the moon. do check it pls.(wrote another for more clarification)
also this happened once not sure what happened two pieces on same place
Something similar happened to me but It didnt crash the game just didn't let me move any of my peices. I assumed it was because since my peices has more than one move when in pre turn the game didn't realize that it should end the moon turn and it for some reason didnt let me click end turn either.
The Skelepawns are incredibly bugged. If they're around and there's room on the raft, they try to board it, and take the same space as actual normal pieces, then explode and kill the normal piece when the raft launches.
just did a piece deck with reverse fool 21 move with empress/ inverse empress so it cant die form over exaustion i think it need to be a little nerf (the piece deck is reverse fool empreror two time empress the world two time) also just the world in genarld is broken you get six move with thing that say you cant get extra move ( sorry for the bad grammar)
The last thing isn't a soft lock. You just have to do the sacrifice as it says, it's not optional. This even is a way to discourage against just having too many queens.
i think reverse death need a fix at the end of the round i get soul for ervir piece i make with it by get i mean they get sacrifice also they something stack so i try to move them of the raft and after the first one it stop letting me move them so when i end round something it destroy my normale piece that are not poison i just did a run evrirthing got sacrifice and i got a gameover when i was going to the next island but i did make a lot of piece than time (sorry for the grammar mistake)
Good point, that card was one of the first reversed ones I made and didn't really balance it properly for player use and mainly for the boss. I guess the clones should be temporary only for the encounter where they're spawned.
Huh, how? That seems like quite a lot... 😂 Did you just sac everything at that point? What would you consider to be an achievement worthy amount of souls earned in a run?
Well at this point I had collected quite a lot of different pieces and bought lots of cards.
I had one queen with judgement (souls from kills) and world (more moves) and another with high priestess (give moves) and world (more moves). The rest of the starting board was filled with pieces with as many card slots filled with fool cards. I never moved these pieces unless absolutely necessary. And of course I maxed out each pieces slots with emperor cards.
I declined every single event and received more and more souls each time. At the end of turn 10 I sacrificed all my pieces. -> 1350 souls
I feel like 500 souls felt like an achievement but then it got quite easy to reach. 1000 souls is more like an achievement because then you can basically clear out the shop. Maybe everything in the shop should be more expensive? I think a tarot card could cost like 50 souls but then again early game would feel so slow.
I just bought a second bishop and now they're stacking? Like I got no way to separate them and I'm pretty sure there are two of them since it says I got three different pieces, and when scrolling through them it shows me two bishops, one with one card slot and one with none, on the exact same spot. Is there a way to "untangle" them?
Yeah, sadly it can happen quite a lot/easily on this original version of the game. There will be an patch coming to it in about a week or so fixing this and adding a bunch of more stuff too.
This was unbeatable. I couldn't figure out how the opponent (white) made all their pieces immortal on each turn.
Another dead end: I lost my last piece by hermit+emperor combo by the queen on the top. The piece had copied the abilities from my pieces. The game is waiting me to end my turn but the end turn button won't function.
Combinations of weird card interactions and bugs probably. Looking at the pic, it looks like the king is triggering the lovers effect (it caught from that one pawn with chaos ability). And it probably can probably "see" that pawn due to copied magician ability ie. allowing to telefrag on top of any piece. What a combo. 🤯
I guess there are also some missing game over checks on cases where pieces die on "weird" times like the hermit mines and gets stuck there. More things to add to my fix list, thanks for these! ❤️
This happened. Not sure how because there were way too many pieces on the board. Day 30+. I tried to take the king but my piece acted like the square was empty. So maybe the piece was supposed to be removed but instead just remained on the board inactive
I also found an easy way to get souls quickly. Pick as many tarot cards on your starting pieces as possible (emperor helps here), beat the first island, move all your pieces away from your "ship", then embarking will destroy all pieces and cards giving you lots of souls. I get 50+ souls with 5 pieces + cards. It's way too powerful.
Got stuck on pre-turn. No moves left and end turn button does nothing.
I had a queen with 5 moves and Moon and Death cards which I moved around killing pieces until I accidentally killed one with a Justice card. Then the game got stuck. Animations are still playing but I have no pieces with moves and the end turn button is broken. It still has clicking animation but nothing happens.
EDIT: It happened again. I killed a pawn with Justice with a piece that would have had moves left.
---
Also, the game gets increasingly more sluggish the further you progress.
It's a nice game idea but I'd like some kind of a goal like in Coup Ahoo. Something to work towards. I think some mechanism which made you lose pieces randomly (for example sacrifice events could pick a random piece) would be nice because once you get 9 queens the game offers no challenge whatsoever.
Good point, maybe I should add some events or other ways to discourage just having too many queens. And I am indeed adding a bit more content and things to strive for in the upcoming patch (coming out in a week or so). There is at least gonna be some hand crafted boss encounters and a deckful of new cards too to collect. So structurally it will be a bit more like Coup Ahoo where after a set amount of islands (not quite sure on the count yet) you're going to encounter a boss and beating it would be considered a win of a run.
btw, pieces can just, spawn on top of each other when loading the game up sometimes? ;-;
It seems to just turn the piece into a ghost that you and enemies can just... walk through. managed to get a bunch of free souls from foolish queens in the corner that take up no space xD
was so busy with exams, can't believe I missed an anttihaavikko game drop D:
also, isn't the hierophant just a better version of high priestess since you can chain them with each other? maybe disallow it from gaining extra moves from other hierophants, to prevent just giving yourself 50 moves during the start of each new day
also, also, I find that enemy pieces who have the devil card tend to always either walk on black spaces or attack my pieces, which means when they can't reach a piece of mine, they just keep walking between two spots until they get overexhausted looool
also, also, also, justice activates even if a piece has empress and dodges the death??? fix justice card's description please :pray:
Thanks for the pointers! I've actually even fixed quite a few of these already (along with other balance changes etc) and there is still about two weeks left until I can patch the game again so plenty of time to fix the rest too. Yeah justice definitely shouldn't trigger when the target does an empress dodge.
Honestly there wasn't really much balancing at all in the current version due to lack of dev time. And even for the future patch version I'm working on, there isn't real rhyme or reason behind how I balance things. I just play around with it and see how it feels and adjust accordingly.
That is the intended way. You lose all the souls you don't use when you start a new run. So you can't just pile on quick one level runs and build up you souls to buy something expensive.
Nice concept but a lot of issues, levels generated where you can't move. Stalemates. It started to become frustrating with the issues and took away from the game.
Thanks for the feedback! Yup, it does have some level generation issues especially in the early game. I have already managed to make it quite a bit better and I am indeed working on improving it further in addition to adding more content to it. So you can expect a patch to drop as soon as the game jam rating period is over (so in about a month).
Its a good game, and I really really want it to be good, but stalemate or impossible maps/games come around the 2nd or 3rd board. PLEASE give a function for the enemy to give up if you cant hit them but you've taken all their pieces and they cant hit you
Well yeah, I gotta improve the early game quite a bit. But I don't really agree that the enemy should give up on a stale. It's a draw, not a win for the player. Maybe the enemy should run away in those scenarios not offering you a reward for the "win". But in an ideal world these stale situations wouldn't even be all that common. I think a lot of them are caused by bishops. I have improved the level generation to do less of those one tile bishop trap bridges and plan on doing quite a bit more of level generation finessing to make the experience all in all smoother.
The enemy should definitely give up on a stalemate, with rewards, aside from maybe not getting the pieces that "ran away".
There is no way to 100% eliminate stalemates if you're doing random generation with these fairy chess modifiers; if it isn't a P=NP problem it's darn close.
If you feel like you really, really need to have the player "prove control" or punish draws in some way, give us the ability to manually leave an island with whatever pieces are currently in the next raft, and a reward of the pieces we've captured.
Yup, you are correct. It will be impossible to eliminate stalemates completely. But I would like to at least make they way less prone to happening in the early levels. Maybe the opponent should give up and still give out the rewards. I was initially thinking of it not being the opposite but maybe it'll feel better to the player that way. I gotta play around with it and see how it feels.
But as you stated, even detecting those stale situations isn't all that simple task to tackle with all the card modifiers. I guess with no "punishment" for stalemating and having the enemy give up would make it more lenient for the detection so it doesn't matter that much even if they sometimes give up even if they still had a fighting chance.
Wanted to see this be successful! I love chess and roguelikes, but I found stalemate and insufficient material around 1/3 of boards before progressing any further. Could be aided with a few procedural suggestions:
Check that spawning pieces have at least one potential move on the board before spawn (Bishops sometimes get stuck on little islands early in the game)
Guarantee each island connects to the boat with at least two tiles (the one tile often bottlenecks out bishops and makes it extremely annoying to shuffle pieces)
Prohibit light-square bishops from spawning the first three days
I'm pretty confident most day 1-3 stales would be prevented by a few tweaks
Good ideas, I've actually already tweaked the island generation so that it doesn't do those one wide bottle neck bishop traps at all in the early levels and lowers the chance of them later on too. Only dark square bishops on early levels would be an easy addition and will indeed fix quite a lot of the problems. And forcing the raft to connect to at least two squares on the board would indeed make it feel better later on when you have more pieces on play.
A nice approach, have seen this type of game before. I think stale mate would be fine in case of repetitive (>3x) moves. I think it is more 'chess like' than surrendering in case both parties can't make a break-through. Nice work on the explanationa and introduction, goes quite smooth.
Yeah I gotta do something about that. I have already changed the level generation so that the single wide bridges (that are bishop traps) do not appear at all in the early levels and are much rarer later on too. Ideally I would like to detect the states where it's impossible for either side to win but it's not all that easy to do. Like usually a queen can't catch a bishop 1 on 1 but sometimes they can depending on the terrain. And of course card effects add a lot more complexity on top of handling the normal cases.
This happens a lot. The opponent can't move and I can't reach them, so I have to give up. I also end up in a stalemate a lot. The game should recognize when no action can be taken.
Yeah, that sucks. But it should happen that much really, maybe you were just very unlucky. Detecting stalemates would be a bit tricky. With just the chess pieces it would be pretty doable but with all the different possible effects and their combinations, it seems safer to leave it to the player to decide. And I already changed the island generation to do way less of these 1 wide choke points and completely avoid them on the first islands too. But I guess it's gonna be a bit of a wait before I can patch the game again.
I am surprised that stalemate detection would be challenging. Iterate over the current player's pieces and count the number of available moves. If they are fewer than 1 -> stalemate. What could I be missing? I assume that you have something that detects valid moves as the board tiles are properly highlighted when a piece is selected.
In terms of priorities , probably not the most urgent issue.
Oh yeah of course just finding out situations where you have no moves at all would be a piece of cake. But I was thinking more of detecting cases where you couldn't win no matter what even if you had loads of different moves to make.
Wow great concept and the title gave me a chuckle.
You really love your tarot cards, haha.
I was able to break the game on the third attempt. I was already on island 16 or 18. I had 4-5 queens and a king. I was stacking a lot of extra turns, sometimes reaching 5 turns for a single piece. I had reached over 100 souls. The last thing that I did was rearranging my cards before leaving a friendly island. As I pressed embark some of my pieces disappeared and the game froze. (web build)
Still - had a good fun. The tarot upgrades make for some unusual puzzles with the enemies. Some of the upgrades are more troublesome than others. Does the difficulty progression account for that?
Haha, I don't know why I keep going for tarot cards that often. I decided kinda fast that I wanted the items to be cards as it synergizes thematically nicely with chess being a board game and obviously after the classic playing cards, tarots are the first thing that come to mind. And they really offer a nice well rounded and decently numbered set of pretty abstract and versatile themes to plan the effects around.
The difficulty, if you can call it that, is just the enemy counts increasing and they getting more and more cards and effects. So the real difficulty really is all about what kind of random stuff they get really. There was probably some weird random error happening on the level/enemy generation, I gotta do some more testing on the higher levels. I didn't really test at 10+ that much at all really. You should have still at least saved some of your souls even if it froze as it does save that periodically?
But I still do like the concept of the game and plan on keeping working on it for a bit at least. Gotta still work on balancing everything better, fixing bugs and adding more stuff.
Is that the downloaded or web version? Looks like it's doing everything mirrored, everything that should be on the right is on left and vice versa. Except for the menu "opening direction" which is correctly moving it right (from left though, instead of off screen from right edge). Is your system/browser using right to left writing mode by any chance?
Awesome, good to know that it worked and maybe I'll know to sidestep this land mine in the future. Patch coming right up to fix the logo fully too. Huge thanks for pointing this out and quick reply/re-test!❤️❤️
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Played two runs and both times had to give up on the second island because I ended up in a situation neither player could win. I like the concept but how it's played out leaves a lot to be desired.
Always interesting to see what you come up with.
Cool! Quite a few bugs I noticed from there that nobody had reported so far. And some of them like the event choice cancel button being visible all the time, even after accepting the deal seemed to happen consistently too.
One thing you probably didn't realize since all your wins were flawless was is that you can kinda freely sac your units to bait the AI which speeds up flow quite a bit. The lost pieces are revived after each level so you don't lose anything that way.
Thanks for making a video! ❤️ Always useful to see someone play your games to spot out the possible pain points and issues.
so uh what do I do now
Wow that's a lot of moves on that queen. Do you mean how to beat that boss without a pawn? There is still a way since enemies also die when they don't have any valid moves.
if a piece with the moon gets defeated by justice during the pre turn,the game crashes. for this the player must only have 1 piece with the moon. do check it pls.(wrote another for more clarification)
also this happened once not sure what happened two pieces on same place
Thanks for reporting this. Doesn't seem like just those two things cause the crash and there must be something else in addition.
Something similar happened to me but It didnt crash the game just didn't let me move any of my peices. I assumed it was because since my peices has more than one move when in pre turn the game didn't realize that it should end the moon turn and it for some reason didnt let me click end turn either.
The Skelepawns are incredibly bugged. If they're around and there's room on the raft, they try to board it, and take the same space as actual normal pieces, then explode and kill the normal piece when the raft launches.
just did a piece deck with reverse fool 21 move with empress/ inverse empress so it cant die form over exaustion i think it need to be a little nerf (the piece deck is reverse fool empreror two time empress the world two time) also just the world in genarld is broken you get six move with thing that say you cant get extra move ( sorry for the bad grammar)
Oh crap, does empress protect from exhaustion too? Didn't realize that, definitely needs not to be so.
yes
yo, I think you forgot to account for your final turn being used to sacrifice them to a trapped tile ;-; (got softlocked)
other bugs:
first overlap glitch already xd
2nd softlock, done when I clicked cancel as a response to his queen sacrifice
No screenshot, but you can cancel advice to get fool souls lool
The last thing isn't a soft lock. You just have to do the sacrifice as it says, it's not optional. This even is a way to discourage against just having too many queens.
i think reverse death need a fix at the end of the round i get soul for ervir piece i make with it by get i mean they get sacrifice also they something stack so i try to move them of the raft and after the first one it stop letting me move them so when i end round something it destroy my normale piece that are not poison i just did a run evrirthing got sacrifice and i got a gameover when i was going to the next island but i did make a lot of piece than time (sorry for the grammar mistake)
Good point, that card was one of the first reversed ones I made and didn't really balance it properly for player use and mainly for the boss. I guess the clones should be temporary only for the encounter where they're spawned.
even that i think is too storg maybe limite the clone to like 5 because of card like devil you can get a swarm of them
WELL THIS IS ANNOYING. I can't get him. And he can't get me.
True, it really is. Will be fixed on the upcoming patch.
I got to 1350 souls at the end of day 10
Huh, how? That seems like quite a lot... 😂 Did you just sac everything at that point? What would you consider to be an achievement worthy amount of souls earned in a run?
Well at this point I had collected quite a lot of different pieces and bought lots of cards.
I had one queen with judgement (souls from kills) and world (more moves) and another with high priestess (give moves) and world (more moves). The rest of the starting board was filled with pieces with as many card slots filled with fool cards. I never moved these pieces unless absolutely necessary. And of course I maxed out each pieces slots with emperor cards.
I declined every single event and received more and more souls each time. At the end of turn 10 I sacrificed all my pieces. -> 1350 souls
I feel like 500 souls felt like an achievement but then it got quite easy to reach. 1000 souls is more like an achievement because then you can basically clear out the shop. Maybe everything in the shop should be more expensive? I think a tarot card could cost like 50 souls but then again early game would feel so slow.
I just bought a second bishop and now they're stacking? Like I got no way to separate them and I'm pretty sure there are two of them since it says I got three different pieces, and when scrolling through them it shows me two bishops, one with one card slot and one with none, on the exact same spot. Is there a way to "untangle" them?
It acts as only one bishop in game too.
I think you only have 2 (starting) slots on the raft so you're just switching between the two. You could replace the pawn with the second one though.
oh I didn't quite get that you should put an indicator somewhere that tells you how many slots you have
Yup, good point.
I got stuck :(
my bishop on white vs. opponent bishop on black, no other pieces left
Yeah, sadly it can happen quite a lot/easily on this original version of the game. There will be an patch coming to it in about a week or so fixing this and adding a bunch of more stuff too.
nice, what kind of stuff?
At least boss fights and more cards and events. And I'm adding an achievement/challenge system too to have more something to aim for.
Nice
Two dead ends:
This was unbeatable. I couldn't figure out how the opponent (white) made all their pieces immortal on each turn.
Another dead end: I lost my last piece by hermit+emperor combo by the queen on the top. The piece had copied the abilities from my pieces. The game is waiting me to end my turn but the end turn button won't function.
Combinations of weird card interactions and bugs probably. Looking at the pic, it looks like the king is triggering the lovers effect (it caught from that one pawn with chaos ability). And it probably can probably "see" that pawn due to copied magician ability ie. allowing to telefrag on top of any piece. What a combo. 🤯
I guess there are also some missing game over checks on cases where pieces die on "weird" times like the hermit mines and gets stuck there. More things to add to my fix list, thanks for these! ❤️
This happened. Not sure how because there were way too many pieces on the board. Day 30+. I tried to take the king but my piece acted like the square was empty. So maybe the piece was supposed to be removed but instead just remained on the board inactive
I also found an easy way to get souls quickly. Pick as many tarot cards on your starting pieces as possible (emperor helps here), beat the first island, move all your pieces away from your "ship", then embarking will destroy all pieces and cards giving you lots of souls. I get 50+ souls with 5 pieces + cards. It's way too powerful.
Yea maybe starting cards/pieces shouldn't give out any souls when left behind... 🤔
Any recollection what happened to that "ghost king"? Was it ever moving or acting normally anyhow?
Yeah that would solve it. I think that's a fair solution
The Ghost King was not moving but I do not remember what it did before this state. I'll report back if I manage to reproduce it
Got stuck on pre-turn. No moves left and end turn button does nothing.
I had a queen with 5 moves and Moon and Death cards which I moved around killing pieces until I accidentally killed one with a Justice card. Then the game got stuck. Animations are still playing but I have no pieces with moves and the end turn button is broken. It still has clicking animation but nothing happens.
EDIT: It happened again. I killed a pawn with Justice with a piece that would have had moves left.
---
Also, the game gets increasingly more sluggish the further you progress.
It's a nice game idea but I'd like some kind of a goal like in Coup Ahoo. Something to work towards. I think some mechanism which made you lose pieces randomly (for example sacrifice events could pick a random piece) would be nice because once you get 9 queens the game offers no challenge whatsoever.
Good point, maybe I should add some events or other ways to discourage just having too many queens. And I am indeed adding a bit more content and things to strive for in the upcoming patch (coming out in a week or so). There is at least gonna be some hand crafted boss encounters and a deckful of new cards too to collect. So structurally it will be a bit more like Coup Ahoo where after a set amount of islands (not quite sure on the count yet) you're going to encounter a boss and beating it would be considered a win of a run.
When it's my pre-turn, I can control the opponets peices and make them go in bad spots and they don't get their turn back
Actually I can control the opponetns peices whenever is this intended?
Nope 🤔
not exactly...possible to win
a very interesting game!
btw, pieces can just, spawn on top of each other when loading the game up sometimes? ;-;
It seems to just turn the piece into a ghost that you and enemies can just... walk through. managed to get a bunch of free souls from foolish queens in the corner that take up no space xD
Any idea how the pieces were setup on the raft before the restart and them (all three?) being stacked on bottom corner?
was so busy with exams, can't believe I missed an anttihaavikko game drop D:
also, isn't the hierophant just a better version of high priestess since you can chain them with each other? maybe disallow it from gaining extra moves from other hierophants, to prevent just giving yourself 50 moves during the start of each new day
also, also, I find that enemy pieces who have the devil card tend to always either walk on black spaces or attack my pieces, which means when they can't reach a piece of mine, they just keep walking between two spots until they get overexhausted looool
also, also, also, justice activates even if a piece has empress and dodges the death??? fix justice card's description please :pray:
Thanks for the pointers! I've actually even fixed quite a few of these already (along with other balance changes etc) and there is still about two weeks left until I can patch the game again so plenty of time to fix the rest too. Yeah justice definitely shouldn't trigger when the target does an empress dodge.
Nice implementation — I’ve been experimenting with Tafl variants recently and it’s interesting how different rule sets change the strategy.
Curious how you approached balance?
Honestly there wasn't really much balancing at all in the current version due to lack of dev time. And even for the future patch version I'm working on, there isn't real rhyme or reason behind how I balance things. I just play around with it and see how it feels and adjust accordingly.
chess battle archipelago
A little gameplay, some rambling critique ;)
Did I just trapped in a loop
Also the souls don't seem to carry over to the next run if you give up
That is the intended way. You lose all the souls you don't use when you start a new run. So you can't just pile on quick one level runs and build up you souls to buy something expensive.
Nice concept but a lot of issues, levels generated where you can't move. Stalemates. It started to become frustrating with the issues and took away from the game.
Thanks for the feedback! Yup, it does have some level generation issues especially in the early game. I have already managed to make it quite a bit better and I am indeed working on improving it further in addition to adding more content to it. So you can expect a patch to drop as soon as the game jam rating period is over (so in about a month).
Its a good game, and I really really want it to be good, but stalemate or impossible maps/games come around the 2nd or 3rd board. PLEASE give a function for the enemy to give up if you cant hit them but you've taken all their pieces and they cant hit you
Well yeah, I gotta improve the early game quite a bit. But I don't really agree that the enemy should give up on a stale. It's a draw, not a win for the player. Maybe the enemy should run away in those scenarios not offering you a reward for the "win". But in an ideal world these stale situations wouldn't even be all that common. I think a lot of them are caused by bishops. I have improved the level generation to do less of those one tile bishop trap bridges and plan on doing quite a bit more of level generation finessing to make the experience all in all smoother.
The enemy should definitely give up on a stalemate, with rewards, aside from maybe not getting the pieces that "ran away".
There is no way to 100% eliminate stalemates if you're doing random generation with these fairy chess modifiers; if it isn't a P=NP problem it's darn close.
If you feel like you really, really need to have the player "prove control" or punish draws in some way, give us the ability to manually leave an island with whatever pieces are currently in the next raft, and a reward of the pieces we've captured.
Yup, you are correct. It will be impossible to eliminate stalemates completely. But I would like to at least make they way less prone to happening in the early levels. Maybe the opponent should give up and still give out the rewards. I was initially thinking of it not being the opposite but maybe it'll feel better to the player that way. I gotta play around with it and see how it feels.
But as you stated, even detecting those stale situations isn't all that simple task to tackle with all the card modifiers. I guess with no "punishment" for stalemating and having the enemy give up would make it more lenient for the detection so it doesn't matter that much even if they sometimes give up even if they still had a fighting chance.
how about, if you move all your pieces to the boat at the end, you can "run away" and forfeit rewards?
Wanted to see this be successful! I love chess and roguelikes, but I found stalemate and insufficient material around 1/3 of boards before progressing any further. Could be aided with a few procedural suggestions:
Check that spawning pieces have at least one potential move on the board before spawn (Bishops sometimes get stuck on little islands early in the game)
Guarantee each island connects to the boat with at least two tiles (the one tile often bottlenecks out bishops and makes it extremely annoying to shuffle pieces)
Prohibit light-square bishops from spawning the first three days
I'm pretty confident most day 1-3 stales would be prevented by a few tweaks
Good ideas, I've actually already tweaked the island generation so that it doesn't do those one wide bottle neck bishop traps at all in the early levels and lowers the chance of them later on too. Only dark square bishops on early levels would be an easy addition and will indeed fix quite a lot of the problems. And forcing the raft to connect to at least two squares on the board would indeed make it feel better later on when you have more pieces on play.
A nice approach, have seen this type of game before. I think stale mate would be fine in case of repetitive (>3x) moves. I think it is more 'chess like' than surrendering in case both parties can't make a break-through. Nice work on the explanationa and introduction, goes quite smooth.
great game but supper hard !
idea to call a draw as long as one of your pieces are at the end (my bishop was trapped)
Yeah I gotta do something about that. I have already changed the level generation so that the single wide bridges (that are bishop traps) do not appear at all in the early levels and are much rarer later on too. Ideally I would like to detect the states where it's impossible for either side to win but it's not all that easy to do. Like usually a queen can't catch a bishop 1 on 1 but sometimes they can depending on the terrain. And of course card effects add a lot more complexity on top of handling the normal cases.
This happens a lot. The opponent can't move and I can't reach them, so I have to give up. I also end up in a stalemate a lot. The game should recognize when no action can be taken.
Yeah, that sucks. But it should happen that much really, maybe you were just very unlucky. Detecting stalemates would be a bit tricky. With just the chess pieces it would be pretty doable but with all the different possible effects and their combinations, it seems safer to leave it to the player to decide. And I already changed the island generation to do way less of these 1 wide choke points and completely avoid them on the first islands too. But I guess it's gonna be a bit of a wait before I can patch the game again.
I am surprised that stalemate detection would be challenging. Iterate over the current player's pieces and count the number of available moves. If they are fewer than 1 -> stalemate. What could I be missing? I assume that you have something that detects valid moves as the board tiles are properly highlighted when a piece is selected.
In terms of priorities , probably not the most urgent issue.
Oh yeah of course just finding out situations where you have no moves at all would be a piece of cake. But I was thinking more of detecting cases where you couldn't win no matter what even if you had loads of different moves to make.
Wow great concept and the title gave me a chuckle.
You really love your tarot cards, haha.
I was able to break the game on the third attempt. I was already on island 16 or 18. I had 4-5 queens and a king. I was stacking a lot of extra turns, sometimes reaching 5 turns for a single piece. I had reached over 100 souls. The last thing that I did was rearranging my cards before leaving a friendly island. As I pressed embark some of my pieces disappeared and the game froze. (web build)
Still - had a good fun. The tarot upgrades make for some unusual puzzles with the enemies. Some of the upgrades are more troublesome than others. Does the difficulty progression account for that?
Haha, I don't know why I keep going for tarot cards that often. I decided kinda fast that I wanted the items to be cards as it synergizes thematically nicely with chess being a board game and obviously after the classic playing cards, tarots are the first thing that come to mind. And they really offer a nice well rounded and decently numbered set of pretty abstract and versatile themes to plan the effects around.
The difficulty, if you can call it that, is just the enemy counts increasing and they getting more and more cards and effects. So the real difficulty really is all about what kind of random stuff they get really. There was probably some weird random error happening on the level/enemy generation, I gotta do some more testing on the higher levels. I didn't really test at 10+ that much at all really. You should have still at least saved some of your souls even if it froze as it does save that periodically?
But I still do like the concept of the game and plan on keeping working on it for a bit at least. Gotta still work on balancing everything better, fixing bugs and adding more stuff.
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option menu offset, unplayable.
Is that the downloaded or web version? Looks like it's doing everything mirrored, everything that should be on the right is on left and vice versa. Except for the menu "opening direction" which is correctly moving it right (from left though, instead of off screen from right edge). Is your system/browser using right to left writing mode by any chance?
browser, and yeah, that probably the issue.
Pushed a patch now forcing everything to be left-to-right. Is it better now?
titles still wonky, but otherwise yes.
Awesome, good to know that it worked and maybe I'll know to sidestep this land mine in the future. Patch coming right up to fix the logo fully too. Huge thanks for pointing this out and quick reply/re-test!❤️❤️