We have big chess fans in the family so I’ve always wanted to incorporate a chess theme in a game jam. Trijam is a weekly game jam where the goal is to create a game within 3 hours of development time. Trijam’s 261st theme was a perfect fit with the theme: one wrong move. Try out it out here!
The Game Idea
After a bit of brainstorming we came up with the idea of creating a game where your objective is to analyze a famous chess game and identify the blunder.
Our son loves chess. We asked him to create art for the chess game pieces and he happily obliged.
Initially we had a lofty goal have featuring 5 rounds, but due to time constraints the game only has two rounds featuring the matches from:
- MrDodgy Invitational 2.0 with GM Adhiban Baskaran (white) vs GM David Navara (black)
- Altibox Norway Chess with Alireza Firouzja (white) vs Magnus Carlson
The Implementation
The game was written with native JavaScript and HTML. You can find the source code for it here. To play the game, players will:
- Select a square with the game piece to move
- Select a destination square for the same game piece
The game play is a little clunky. Our original intent was to have the user drag and drop game pieces with logic in place for validating whether or not the drop occurred in a valid square. Unfortunately, due to the time constraints we opted for having the user click the to and from destinations.
Hints
We quickly realized, the game is also very challenging. Especially if you are not a regular chess player or have a passion for studying the game. We decided to add a “Reveal Hint” button for players that get stuck. Clicking the button will highlight the square containing the piece to move.
A Blunder of our own
How did this go unnoticed by us?! In our original implementation we got the grid pattern backwards (see gif preview). The square representing h1 was dark instead of light. This error has since been fixed.
Light is on the right!
Useful Resources
I like to log useful tutorial or forum posts that I encounter while working on a game jam. I will highlight them here:
Lessons Learned | Final Thoughts
Overall, we spent about 8 hours on the art and implementation for the game. It was fun creating an app using artwork by our child and it’s definitely something we could like to do again.
Converting the drawings from paper to something that could be used in the game was a little tedious. I could sped up the process with more proficiency in the art tools such as Procreate.
