Hey all!

There’s been some stuff going on over at my Twitter, but I figured I’d take the time to fully write out what’s going to happen to Checkmate and what I’m planning to do with it in the future.

This is going to be a long post, but it’s really worth it to read it all the way through if you’re interested in this game, as a lot of the things you’re seeing on the page right now are going to be adjusted heavily!

The feature creep

If you hadn’t noticed yet, Checkmate is just rattled with feature creep. There are loads of core game mechanic issues, unbalanced features and the goals aren’t very well defined. - Now, I did have some solutions for these, but it simply required… more features.

Here’s a quote I found most interesting from a Reddit post somewhere on the internet:

Credits to mzn528 for making this great comment!

Now, there’s more stuff in this comment, but all of that isn’t of any relevance. The point here is: “If the game isn’t fun, focus on making it more fun”.

And that’s a valid point. Although Checkmate is a good concept and has some well worked out features, it’s not that… fun.

What do you mean with ‘not that fun’?

I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from people who start the game, but don’t really know what they’re doing. This is true in many ways; They understand the main goal of the game (checkmate the enemy opponent), but they don’t really see how to get there.

I’ve put in some things to help with this, such as the exploration element with the artifacts, however, it still doesn’t really work without a set goal. I’ve been thinking about integrating a ‘goal system’, where you’d get a short-term goal such as “mine 10 ore” to give you a bit of hand here, however, this mostly just means that the game will end up in the wrong direction and becomes more of a guided playthrough.

Besides all of that, the first few minutes of a match really aren’t too much fun, as there isn’t a whole lot to do & you’re mainly just waiting for ore to trickle in, or for some pieces to explore some new artifact (which really only gains you two seconds of enjoyment).

So, if the game isn’t all that fun in that area, what is fun about the game?

The fun part

To me, there are two fun things in Checkmate.

The first is the combat. Moving your pieces around, trying to find a strategy is loads of fun. Executing the strategy correctly is really statisfying, but you can also be thrown off in the blink of an eye when the opposing team does something you didn’t expect!

The second is the building element. When you’re building stuff, you unlock new features and it’s great being able to advance your little “town”. However, this is often contradictory as it takes ages before you can build that thing you want to (as you need to research it first)! - When you do build a couple of buildings and it looks really tidy, that’s pretty statisfying.

So, the question arised; Can we take away the feature creep and snip out all the unfun parts, whilst keeping all the fun stuff?

And yes, we can.

Introducing: “Checkmate Simplified”

That’s what I dubbed the current project. “Checkmate Simplified”. It looks somewhat like this:

Whoa! That’s something completely different! Where did the randomized world go? What are those borders on the outside? What’s this different ore mechanic about?

Don’t worry. Let’s dive right into what happened.

What was changed

In order to get rid of the feature creep, I had to cut a lot of features. I settled on these core features to remain a part of the core of the game:

1) Ore management
2) Building stuff
3) Moving / attacking other pieces

Aaaand.. that’s it.

Even though this doesn’t seem like much, the game becomes much easier to understand (both visually and graphically) and loses a lot of it’s overarching complexity.

The game will work more like a card game, where you move each turn and, with the available amount of resources, you do stuff to combat the opponent. This means that we’re going to transition from a cross-over between Sid Meier’s Civilization V and Chess to Scrolls (that Mojang card game) and Chess, however, instead of cards, you’re going to play pieces directly.

The way it’s going to work is something along these lines. Each player takes a turn. During it’s turn, it can choose to do one of three things:

1) Skip the turn (yielding the player +1 ore)
2) Build something (giving some benefit, but costing ore)
3) Move one of his pieces on the field (pretty much equal to playing Chess)

It becomes a more simple strategy game where you can easily set your own goals and do some short-term (but also long-term) planning, much like in Chess and Civ V, keeping the core principles still alive.

However, this game is much more fun! - I’ve thrown it together by taking some already existing code snippets, moving them over, polishing them up a bit, etc. In the course of two weeks, the full game core was rebuilt and re-purposed to suit the new game style!

What about the current version of the game?

I’m going to keep the current version of the game (in case you still enjoy it), but I’ll rebrand the page a bit, updating the screenshots and so on.

The (now-called) legacy version of the game will be moved to a different branch. It will still be available for download for free, however, it will no longer receive any updates. The description of this download will reflect this.

As soon as the new version becomes available for public alpha testing (which is sooner than you’d think!), this version will override the current package build version (meaning you will auto-update on the client) and a new package will be created containing the legacy *.exe files.

Whenever the simplified version becomes available for play, I’ll also fully rebrand the game page, etc. with new images, descriptions and more.

Conclusion & Future

The next step for me is to polish up the mechanics of the new Checkmate. Most of them have already been implemented, but they need some additional work to make them suit the theme better. I then need to add a couple of extra pieces (like the bishop and rook) to allow for some more versatile play; I’ll also need to add a simple AI which doesn’t do a whole lot, but does allow you to play the game.

Again, the goal is to make the game more fun and by cutting away a bunch of the excess “flesh”, this should be a big improvement to the game’s overall feeling (also, have I mentioned the amazing performance boost yet?).

I hope you’re all still hyped for the game, or maybe even a bit more for this newer version! - I’ll keep using this as a devlog from now on, so make sure to keep checking it out for some updates every now and then! The first bits of gameplay should follow soon!

Have a great day and see y’all next time!

~Gavin