Project background

• Engine: Unity
• Platform: PC
• Genre: Roguelike, Strategy, Turnbased, Chess-like,
• Group size: 1

I got the chance to develop one of my game concepts into a full-fledged gameplay prototype with GDD. I had the rough idea bouncing around in my head for about a year and really wanted to see what a more complete version of it would look like.

Concept

ChessPawn ChamPion is a Strategy roguelike in which you control a single pawn that you turn into a super soldier chesspiece. The main features are about managing your limited special moves and attacks while trying to avoid dying to the enemy pieces.

I worked on

• Turn based combat that uses an event system to form an observer pattern and increase the Modularity of the code.
• Designing a Roguelike Progression system that rewards risk management and challenging yourself.
• Implementing QoL UI that ensures the player can see all the nessesary information and make decissions without feeling frustrated with the result.

Gameplay

The core of the gameplay are the ‘actions’ these are strong mobility or attack moves that you can use to get out of difficult situations or make impactful plays. these ‘actions’ have a cooldown which means using them at the right time is critical for success. Thinking ahead is of course also very importand as killing the wrong enemy at the wrong time can leave you open to attack from pieces hiding behind them.

the game Follows and event-based turn system of: Player moves > Player attacks > Enemies attack > Enemies move > Repeat. This turn order keeps the gameplay organized and prevents player frustration resulting from unexpected enemy moves resulting in them taking damage.

Between fights the player would move around a map somewhere between Slay the Spire and Enter the Breach choosing what kind of fights to take and adapting to the gamestate in order to reach and beat all of the bosses.

Game design

While the gameplay prototype is not the full gameloop but only the combat I did design the full game in the GDD for this project. prototyping these was unfortunatly out of scope for the time i had available.

Rewards and progression

The reward structure of ChessPawn Champion is inspired by Slay the Spire and focuses on the player balancing their resources and risk against getting as strong as possible. Requiring the player to make a plan and inevitably change it when something goes wrong or very right.

The progression is centered on the ‘action’ system, the player gets to choose new ones as reward for fights and upgrade them in different ways troughout the run with each upgrade adding new utility or increasing the power of the ‘action’ sometimes at the cost of a higher cooldown.

UI and Accessability

While designing the UI i spent a lot of time thinking about how to improve clarity and QoL for the player. To do this one of the main priorities was to let the player see the attack and move capabilities of themselves and their enemies. one of the examples of this is letting the player see where they will be able to attack if they move to a tile in realtime.

I also wanted to have the UI include as few numbers as possible and therefore chose to go with pips for the cooldown indicators and Healthbar to give players all the information at a glance.

I also paid atention to accessability and QoL with the input system, which might require more clicks and mouse movement than practical or preferred for some players. My solution was to provide players the option to use keyboard input to select pieces and actions or move and attack.

Skills and technologies

• Coding
  • Unity
  • C#
  • Prototyping
  • Software design patterns
• Game design
  • GDD
  • Design requirements
  • Level Design
  • Narrative
  • UI
  • Eye for accessability

Resources

Before developing this game i needed to understand how to make normal chess which i did with the tutorial below and used as the foundation of this game,