Phantom Chess
Phantom Chess is an auto-chess game built for Geta Game Jam 8, held in July 2019. The player plays against the AI and tries to reach the highest level they can. The game goes on till the player loses. It functions as a regular auto-chess game where the player can buy/sell units, upgrade them via combining 3, and more.
The game was built using the Unity3D engine and written in C#. I worked in a team of two on this, as a gameplay programmer. I programmed the combat, movement and combination functionalities that were core to the game, among other features.
The game can be found at geist-191.itch.io/phantom-chess, and here’s a gameplay sample:
Following are some of my thoughts on the overall experience of developing the app. If you prefer to not read the rest of the post, you can go back to the portfolio home by clicking here.
Background
As with other game jams I participated in, I wanted to work with as many of my friends as possible. And since I had never developed alone with this one friend of mine, we decided to make a game together. Geta Game Jam 8 was coming up, and we decided to participate.
Development Process
The theme of the jam was “Dreams and Nightmares”. Since the Auto-Chess genre was starting to get popular around the time, we decided to try making an Auto-Chess game. However, we knew that making a full-fledged multiplayer game was out of our scope since we did not have the time or experience for it. We decided to implement the basic functionality of an auto-chess game first (buying/selling units, combining units, progressing levels, etc.) and go from there, depending on how much time we had left for the jam.
For the theme, we decided to have two units belonging to the “dreams” side, such as a priest or an angel. The “nightmare” side has counterparts such as a “shadow being” or a “dark priest”. We managed to get the core auto-chess functionality developed well in time. Thus, we decided to spend the rest of the time polishing what we already had and balancing the difficulty of the levels.
Final Thoughts. What did I learn?
Overall, I was happy with what we created, and it remains one of my favourite games that I’ve developed.
My teammate during this project was one of the people I had troubles working before. However, I learned to put those issues behind me and approach this project with a clear and open mind. And it worked very well! We had a fun time, and as a result, the game developed at the end was well-polished and was a product we were happy with. This was also the first isometric 3D game I had ever worked on, and learning to work with such an environment was also a good experience.