0.1 - Release and Debrief

Catching up on some missed dev logs, so this one is coming out a week late. In case this is the first one you stumbled upon, this game was made as part of my self-imposed game-a-week challenge.

Fencing Masters of Chrogue or Chrogue for short started from a desire to make some kind of square grid rogue-like to develop on some ideas I had making DogPushCow. I particularly wanted to challenge myself to be rigorous about actually storing the grid and its contents, having run into issues where I had cut corners in that regard on several previous projects.

The  basic idea of chess, but you get to build your own piece feels like it has legs. I started with a list of movesets taken from The Duke, a print-and-play boardgame by Jeremy Holcomb and Stephen McLaughlin, but ended up changing most of the moves both to diversify what you could do with your left and right hand weapon and to ensure that each weapon has at least some argument for using it. Even the humble dagger provides pretty extreme utility when you consider swapping it to gain access to unrestricted directional movement.

The big thing I'm proud of here is the sprite set - inspired by Kenney's 1 bit pack in places, but 100% hand drawn. In the release version I started seeing a little bit of grain from improperly cleaning certain scans, which is too bad, but overall I think my workflow for getting sharpie drawings into Unity is working alright. It gives me a pretty broad latitude for making new sprites, which really opens some doors for developing more novel game concepts.

A lot of time on this project went into tuning the AI. Writing chess bots is a field of study unto itself, but I took to heart an idea from Jake  Solomon about intentionally design an AI that leaves specific vulnerabilities for the player. In particular, this one doesn't consider the launchable furniture and has a bad habit of leaving pawns out to dry in its efforts to check the player. This was a lot of fun and I could see doing more work in this vein.

With more time in this project, I'd invest more in the narrative and presentation. I don't mind the monochrome, but the music is a little maudlin. The fencer story is nice, but its barely in the game. I'd love to get some dialogue taunts in as well as more of a sense of the coming final boss. Right now the fact that the final boss uses the weapons from your last win is entirely missable...