Chess: Evolve

Chess: Evolve is a roguelite tower-defense game where you deploy chess pieces as units and defend your King from waves of enemies. Each run gives you a random set of piece cards. Drag to place them on the board, or sacrifice cards to gain mana and redraw!

Your pieces attack automatically using their own unique patterns, and units only level up after you finish the run. When a run ends, you can unlock a new piece or permanently evolve one of your units into a stronger form, slowly building a customized army for future attempts.

Created as the final project for CPI 211 at Arizona State University, this prototype includes our full card system, unit placement, enemy waves, mana/sacrifice mechanics, and foundational progression. Try different builds, defend your King, and see how far you can evolve your army! 

Controls

Click 

Drag and drop controls

Postmortem

Overall:

Chess: Evolve succeeded in most of its initial vision. So features were cut for time but the original vision is still very much there. Chess: Evolve had many ups and downs in its development. We were very good at creating what we needed on time even when we constricted ourselves to very little time. Communication and direction were all over the place from good to bad. But, when it came to the actual game all of our developers did an amazing job contribution.

The Good:

The game is very much done with its core. We did meet all of our milestones in time. The game has a unique flair that can be built upon to further make more levels and interesting design for the player. Even with the very unbalanced team of 5:1 programmers to artists we still managed to build a game that follows closely to its vision.

The Bad:

The game feels lackluster with difficulty and levels. We put so much focus on the core and features that we didn’t expand on making two many levels. At the end of it we had a level and a half. The second level was half done. The other major issues with our team was the lack of initial direction and an overall lack of communication between members until forced. At the beginning of our development we were very scattered and very confused on what we had to do. This led to a lack of direction and lack of actual work being done. By our first milestone, we had barely met what we wanted with some teammates not fully knowing what they had to do. This didn’t persist throughout the development of the game but it very much was a big issue. Communication was the other massive key problem. Although, communication between each other was very easy to do as we had set up a discord server so we can update on progress and ask each other for help. Even with the resources available there were many issues with asking each other as there were many in-between conversations that had to be done. 

Solution:

The solution we came up with was to enforce progress checks and add more member to member communications for tasks that  intertwined. After the first milestone, we quickly realized we needed to set up a system where we had to complete more work in an organized manner.  The solution we came up with was periodic internal progress checks that had people post their work and expand upon what tasks needed to be made or adjusted. This naturally gave for clearer direction and fixed many of the early communication issues. Although there were still many issues individually, we solved those on our own. 

What we learned:

The biggest lesson we learned through this game development process is that clear direction and communication can change any development of a game upside down. A lack of direction will lead to a confused and unfocused team. The biggest letdown is that this slowed our development and made us lose features and levels we could have had. 

Credits:

Pablo Pelaez Fundora - Programming -  Team Lead

Enemies AI, Waves and lanes System

Nathan Chen -  Programming

Evolution system

Sammy Vongphosy - Programming 

Level design and in game level progression systems

Taylor Young - Art

Pixel art, cards, 3d character models, game art UI

Ethan Peterson - Programming

Player controller systems an player placement system

Esha Sethi - Programming

UI systems and Card system