Death Chess

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  Main Menu Screen

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  Starting Chess Board

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  The mini game that is played when capturing pieces

Inspiration

Death Chess takes inspiration from Chess and FPS Chess. With that idea we decided to match chess with fighting genre. We initially came up with the plan to create it based off Super Smash Bros but instead choose to take more inspiration from the Mortal Combat series. I recently started getting into chess over these past few months and thought it would be cool to implement this in a program. And might as well add a mini game cause why not.

What it does

Death Chess is our take on the age old game chess and mixing it with a quick and simple fighting system. It allows two players to play chess against each other, but every time a piece is captured a mini game is played in order to take that piece. Win the game? Take the piece. Lose? They take your piece.

How we built it

Death Chess was initially going to built in Unity. However we ran into issues with what files needed to be pushed to a repository. We ended up using the Pygame Package in Python as our "game engine" which allows us to use sprites, windows, and other game related objects. The python chess package was also used for move validation and accessing legal moves. We used GitHub to allow us to quickly work on different parts of the program at the same time.

Challenges we ran into

We are from a small college about 5 hours away. Our team is consist of two hackers that have been to one hackathon each, and two hackers experiencing their first hackathon. We initially were going to create a game in Unity but ran into issues of commiting our project to GitHub. We decided to scratch that idea and create the game in Python using the Pygame and Chess module.

Programming in Python was rather easy but the parts of the game we ran into the most was definitely switching between the game of Chess and the Fighting portion of the game. The most pressing issue was saving the data between the two states of play. We ended up using a temp file in order to save the information game to game. We then pulled the information needed from game to game and had to essentially constantly re-write the temp files as the games went on.

The chess portion of this game was also very challenging. The module came with the most basic rules. We had to implement promotions and making sure that what happens on this board is stored to a temp file. When converting the pawn promotion into a GUI, there was major problems with legalizing this move as it is a special case.

The fighting portion of this game was not as difficult. The logic of the actual game was much more difficult than implementing physics and collisions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The two experienced hackers on this team had failed to make a successful project in the past. This was a redemption arc for them.

We are very proud on how we used GitHub and that we were able to avoid any major conflicts in pushing and pulling changes. This was a major issue last time, but because we have had this past experience, we have learned how to deal with these.

Overall we're proud of how well we worked as a team and enjoyed getting to know each other. Also seeing a final project that looks very well polished is very accomplishing as well.

What we learned

We are proud of the fact that we learned the structure and general patterns in creating fighting games.

The two unexperienced hackers learned the greatness of using GitHub while also learning how to use Pygame. They also learned that preparation is key to Hackathons.

What's next for Death Chess

We intend to at least make this game into a living and breathing meme at some point. After that the game will be mostly done and it will forever be a stepping stone to more advance games (Hopefully in Unity this time).

Built With

• github
• pygame
• python