Posted August 28, 2023 by snekos
#chess
This is a reflection about my participation to the game jam GAME-A-WEEK #10 San Japan which ended August 28th 2023.
My idea was about mixing chess and runner game : a black knight is going forward, trying to escape the control zones of the white pieces appearing on his way.
I've never finished coding a chess engine but I'm a long time lurker of the Computer Chess Club forum ; this has paid off on this jam because I was able to implement from scratch the movement and control zones of all the chess pieces without much difficulty.
I'm also proud to have implemented without any help a branchless min function (it works only on positive integers though).
On a preceding game jam, I made by necessity a backend completly separated from the game engine. This time, I've done it by choice and it was very effective for several reasons ; a big one is the gain in testability. I was able to simulate random gameplay in tests which has been a great way to find and fix bugs.
The discovery of the HaxeFlixel game framework was a very pleasant surprise (weird that I miss it when I recently reviewed the game framework landscape). The documentation and tooling is excellent and it seems to be very mature and a big success for an open source project.
I'm becoming familiar with the Haxe language and I'm convinced that I will continue to use it. Its syntaxic features are pretty good and its transpilation capabilities are very useful to me.
I wasn't able to release a game before the end of the jam. I was missing 1 day of work, maybe even more.
At the beginning of the jam, I had some difficulties to find a game idea with a scope small enough to do it in one week. I've also taken some time before renouncing to use UE5 as a game engine.
My productivity hasn't become better, I had some good coding sessions but I'm still very unsatisfied about my work capacity.
Even with my past experiences, there was lost time because I was completly ignorant about the tools to manage texture packs/sprite sheets.
I've confirmed the importance to test as I code. Writing too much code without testing can cost much time.
I was working without any planning and only a small design document ; after reflection, I think I should make for myself some simple templates for :