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A jam submission

Stretchy ChessView game page

Chess, but the pieces can grow and shrink!
Submitted by tannern, hoopty — 52 minutes, 5 seconds before the deadline
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Stretchy Chess's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Creativity#17483.5003.500
Overall#33672.9232.923
Enjoyment#34612.7312.731
Style#45462.5382.538

Ranked from 26 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How does your game fit the theme?
The chess pieces can grow and shrink

Development Time

96 hours

(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
Wood textures by "Luke.RUSTLTD" on OpenGameArt: https://opengameart.org/content/5-wood-textures

Horse head by Oleksandr Zymohliad on SketchFab: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/chessboard-3cee8ada5d99468cbc93ded83b3ca70a
(only horse head was used; rest of the pieces were made by us)

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

I love the concept, could make for some really interesting chess games! Hopefully you'll fix the major bugs such as check detection not working in the future!

Submitted(+1)

The variety of strategic options really sets this game apart from classic chess. I appreciate it when established ideas are explored from a fresh perspective.

Submitted(+1)

Very interesting idea! :3

Submitted(+1)

Very clever idea, would love to play a more polished version with a friend

Submitted(+1)

A very clever variant of chess which is very on theme, well done!!! A lot of interesting strategies come from the new mechanics, and they are well balanced too seemingly! Sometimes pieces behave strangely when stretched in particular ways/places, but nothing game breaking which is good to see!

Submitted(+1)

Yay very cool

Submitted(+1)

had fun playing a few games with a friend, it's really funny stretching pawns to use as blockers out of nowhere and i often would want to stretch pieces instead of naturally move them which got me into some poor positions, but felt like it was a decent variant- there's some ambiguity as to how the stretched pieces move  and some bugs that we had to work around
sometimes when stretching your piece it will lock up in the wrong spot and you'll have to stretch it again from the original position to make it work again
the broken code for asking for checks probbably could have been left out, we had to work around the fact that sometimes it asked us to block a check that wasn't really there-  let the player die to being taken instead and it works a lot better

and sadly as we were deep into our second game we got a stack overflow error that i forgot to screenshot to share, it seemed like a browser version bug more than anything but idk, had fun anyways

Developer

Glad you enjoyed the concept and had some fun despite all the bugs! We were really hoping to have a basic chess bot which required being able to detect when a player is in check, but as we ran out of time I agree that it may have been wiser to leave that out. Thanks for the feedback!

Submitted(+1)

Nice job for coding a chess game in 4 days !

Developer (1 edit)

Thanks! We went with a chess variant to “scope small” not fully realizing how complex chess programming is. Hence all the bugs we didn’t have time to iron out :)

Submitted

I don't think chess can be improved in any way, or else it would have changed already over the years...

Nice try though!

Submitted(+1)

This is so creative and funny haha! With more time and polish this could be so funny :)

Submitted(+1)

I made 2x2 queen, and dominated.

Submitted

A bit buggy, a tutorial would be nice, the game crashed, but otherwise, good job!

Submitted

Nice twist on the classical chess game! Unfortunately I wasn't able to scale them properly so that took away some joy :/

I enjoy chess, but this game will take a heavy hit on "creativity". Maybe it would be better to create your own type of board game similar to chess, instead of copying it?

Then lastly the visuals are there, but they could be more polished, even in regular chess-sets you can purchase different chess-themes- I would have created a styalized piece of chess game to make it more visually interesting

Developer (1 edit) (+1)

Thanks for the feedback. We were definitely piggy-backing off a well-established game, but the addition of scale does have many subtle and interesting implications on game play that we wanted to explore. Just to name a few:

  • Scaling allows you to capture multiple pieces at once, which is not possible in vanilla chess
  • Being bigger is a double-edged sword. You can capture more pieces but are also an easier target and can’t fit through tight passages.
  • Some endgames that ordinarily result in stalemates in vanilla chess (e.g., king & lone bishop vs lone king) can be converted into checkmates with scaling pieces
  • Pawns can effectively move sideways and backwards via scaling, both of which are impossible in vanilla chess.
  • Likewise, bishops can change square colors via this technique. In vanilla chess, bishops are confined to a single color square the entire game.
Submitted

Then it's a shame scaling didn't work for me :P I think I would have enjoyed playing it properly! 

idk how the scaling works now, but whenever you have a piece selected, you could get a UI interface for controls? I.E how to scale them (and if it does already then I missed that part) 

Developer

Apologies the controls weren’t clear. Holding shift and hovering over a piece will cause arrows to appear. From there you can click and drag to scale in the direction of the arrow. See attached gif

I’ll add this to the game description as well so it hopefully helps others in the short term.

Submitted (1 edit)

Thank you for explaining the controls! I took over the map lol:P Instantly became more enjoyable

I tried to add an image of me having the largest bishop lol, OP when he took out a third of enemy-pieces :P Well done!

Though I must agree with another comment here, "chess can't be improved" -and I want to rail back to my comment about creating your own type of board-game with scaling mechanics :) That would boost both creativity, style and most likely enjoyment! 

Submitted(+1)

The stretching was really fun to play with. Nice game

Submitted(+1)

Big Knight is op

Submitted(+1)

I love this game! Had a ton of fun playing multiplayer. Unfortunately a bit bugged, but this is still amazing nonetheless. Great job!

Submitted(+1)

Cool idea! Sadly, I can't castle :(