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A jam submission

ReignCheckView game page

A Survival chess game where you have to watch you back, and your front, and your sides. Twice...
Submitted by ToasterfaceGames (@toasterfacegames) — 4 hours, 32 minutes before the deadline
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ReignCheck's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Playability#2584.0004.000
Cleverness#2824.0004.000
Artistic Style#8933.5003.500
Theme#13302.0002.000

Ranked from 2 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

  • Love the artstyle, would love some audio for the game, background music and some sounds for player movement. The shadow part of the game doesn't translate over really well, though I see where you are trying to go with it. Good work, keep making things!
  • Interesting take on chess, taking pieces to create more. However, one of my main gripes is that the pieces on the black squares are very difficult to see; while this may be your interpretation of the shadow portion of the theme, it can be quite prohibitive. Also you play as the king, but you lose in check, not checkmate, in your game!

Did you include your Game Design Document as a Google Drive link?
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17iTQGpfMKhedmfVjSwTp7X2Uf8YR4Yfx_BJiDPSkvA0/edit?usp=drive_link

Seriously... did you include your Game Design Document?
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17iTQGpfMKhedmfVjSwTp7X2Uf8YR4Yfx_BJiDPSkvA0/edit?usp=drive_link

Is your game set to Public so we can see it?
Yes

Tell us about your game!
Reign Check
A chess survival game where you play as an outnumbered king surrounded by enemies that can hide in the shadow squares.
You must survive by gathering ingredients for potions that can temporarily turn you into other chess pieces.

Click to move, 1 enemy spawns per turn, 1 enemy moves per turn.
If there is no safe moves you get an emergency double move.

10 points to peek into the shadows and see hidden enemies.
10 points to activate hints and see safe passage.

Potion Recipies:

Knight Potion any 2 Ingredients:
KNIGHTmeg, HORSEraddish, KNIGHTella, VegiKNIGHT.

Rook Potion any 3 Ingredients:
Rookie Dough, Brookcoli, Castlerole, Castle oil.

Bishop Potion any 3 Ingredients:
Bish-hops, Bisqueop, Bishchops, Priestry, Priestrami, Pastor.

Queen Potion any 5 ingredients:
QUEENwa, Ice QUEEN, QUEENce, QUEEN cuisine, Sour QUEEN.



Controls:
Mouse click hover or touch based controls on smart devices.

Extra Notes
This is my first game jam, my first game commercial game is in development right now:
Pedal Rebel VR - Is an exercise bike VR game that is designed to help gamers get healthy and have fun while doing it.

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Cool take on the game of chess and very creative ingredient names lmao. Sometimes it felt like the enemy piece that killed me just spawned out of nowhere. A slower death animation that shows the enemy piece moving to your king to capture it would be nice

Developer

thanks, definitely in the works for post jam. I added that you could see the previous move in the game over screen but the animations created bugs so didn't want to break it right before the jam ended haha.

Will check your game out too!

Submitted(+1)

This was quite fun. In regular chess you almost never get to touch your king, this was such a nice change of pace. I liked trying to work out strategies. The balance was pretty good - there was a time or two where I thought I might be stuck in a stalemate but was able to find the way out.  The art also looks really nice. I didn't have the sound on much so I can't comment about that. 

Developer

awesome thanks for the review, yeah i thought most people would play with sound off, its pretty minimal.
yeah striking the balance between hard and fun is not easy. still tweaking it :)

off to try your game now!

Submitted(+1)

very interesting idea, reminds me a bit of shotgun king!

I wouldnt say Im terrible at chess but it was still pretty hard at first because I kept forgetting that pawns can go in both directions, so maybe you could make their indicator a bit bigger? then I struggled a lot with the spawn rates, for example when like 6 bishops spawn all protecting eachother so you have nowhere to go... but then at some points it almost felt too easy, because pieces only spawn on white and when there are only pawns that cant move there is no immediate danger... I even managed to create an exploit where you can force the AI to repeat the same move endlessly and not spawn any new pieces, so instead of resulting in a draw you can just cheese infinite points (see screenshot)


but overall it was very fun and I loved getting into small manageable puzzle situations! I also think I played this longer than any other game!

legit highscore: 330

Developer(+1)

Wow, thanksfor the review. yeah a lot of those balance issues unfortunately I wasnt able to fix in time. but a few i was in the new version.

Its a real fine line between, challenging and unfair so it takes a lot of testing to know where it needs improvement.

Thanks so much for playing, im keen to keep going and improve the game, further :)

maybe come back in a few weeks and check it out again haha

Developer (1 edit)

I challenge you to get a higher score on the improved version haha, it gets harder faster haha :)

Submitted(+1)

I played the new version a bit and youre right its way harder, dont think I have the patience to beat my score for now... spawning queens early is pretty hard but I guess they give more points so its kinda fair? it does feel a bit punishing when often times you have barely any possible moves, but I think its a good direction to have less pieces but more threatening ones

I also noticed that the black pieces are kind of hard to see on the black tiles when you peek, maybe they can have a white outline?

another thing I notices is that you sometimes get some extra moves and I wasnt sure why and how many, for example after using a potion?

also I think there is a bug where pawns can capture backwards?

highscore on improved version: 177

Developer

haha all good, yeah again great tips. Will be implementing a few of those changes soon :)

Developer

also extra move (green oitline) is when you have no safe moves but arent in check ;)

Submitted(+1)

This was really cool! I really like the memory aspect of not seeing the pieces that have moved to black.

Developer

Thanks yeah, those pesky shadows always get me haha.