With school finally being over, I’ve got around working on a bloom filter.
I thought adding a little “bling” won’t hurt anyone, but apparently it did hurt someone… me. The moment I’ve added the filter as a post-process to the rendering pipe-line, I was horrified to discover that a bloom effect doesn’t really go that well with a white backdrop, and that the colors weren’t as nicely accentuated as I imagined they will be.
That’s why I’ve chosen a rather dull shade of grey, It’s more friendly to the eye and goes really well with the new colors: green and pink.
Also decided to rearrange the starting position of each players pieces. Why? Dunno… Just a gut feeling I guess.
Well, as you can see I won’t go with the classic square chess-board, but rather with a hexagonal one. This kind of layout will, in my opinion, add more depth to the gamplay by forcing the player to take into consideration two types of reflections: the 45 degrees reflection and the 90 degrees one; not just the 90 degrees one, as in regular Laser Chess.
Also, I initally thought that a board with 61 tiles would suffice, but after receiving a bit of feedback I’ve decided to stick to a 127 tile layout, which will allow me to add up to 4 new pieces for each player and hopefully lengthen the actual play-time of a game.
I’ve added a screenshot with the new 127 tile board and also 1 (finished?) model.
Laser Chess is an excellent chess variant that first appeared on the Atari ST in the April 1987 issue of Compute! magazine as winner of a programming contest. Originally written by Mike Duppong, the game was then translated to a number of platforms by enthusiastic fans, including Commodore 64, Amiga, PC DOS, and many other platforms.
Since then Mike Duppong’s game has been re-implemented many times over the intervening years, including several tabletop versions, such as Khet, that featured actual lasers.
In Laser Chess, as in regular Chess, players take turns playing. They are allowed, however, to make up to two moves per turn. Moving a piece one square up, down, left, or right counts as one move. Players can move pieces diagonally only if their path is not blocked and by making two moves — left and back for example. Firing the Laser also counts as one move, but players may only fire it once per turn. If a piece is rotate-able, it may be rotated in 90 degree angles, also at the cost of one move.
Although the game featured practically an infinity of strategic scenarios, it remained nothing more than a TBS cult-game, being overshadowed by more popular games of that time, such as Castelvania 2: Simon’s Quest or 1943: The Battle of Midway.
Today, Laser Chess can be played on a few websites (Ex. www.laserchess.org) and there are a mere handful of stand-alone applications (Ex. www.traygames.com) that mimic the original gameplay.
This is why I decided to develop my very own version of Laser Chess, which will have an enhanced gameplay with a steeper learning curve and will be even more strategy-oriented. (Or at least that’s what I hope.)
I have decided to dedicate my otherwise useless tumblr blog to game developing and also begin work at a project that I had in mind for several months now.
From now on this blog will have my writings about game design, game development. and especially about my own little games and projects.
I have also decided that I will try, as much as possible, not to write from the programmers point of view, but from the point of view of the game designer.
