5 more reviews for Shakmaty + Mini postmortem

Hey! I developed Shakmaty for LD50, it is a simple chess-like puzzle game where the goal is to survive as much moves as possible.

I just needs 5 reviews to leave danger zone, so please check it out and feel free to leave any feedback. I also wanted to include some postmortem about the development.

Teaching the mechanics

One of the main problems of LD games is the large amount of mechanics and keybinds they have. It is hard not to just learn this things for a game you will be playing for a couple of minutes, but it is also hard to teach all this stuff quickly. Here, instead of creating a complex puzzle game and writing the instrucctions in the game page, I used a known set of rules (chess) and created a fictional scenery, therefore making most people understand the rules without telling anything to them.

AI

The hardest part of the game was to create an AI, you know what they say about creating chess AIs. It had to be as clever as possible to make the game fun but also I had to avoid spending too much time on it, and I think the result wasn't that bad.

These are some of the rules:
- Each cell has a value
- It is -1 if the piece is being attacked (adjacent to) by the player (king)
- 100 if the cells attacks the player in diagonal
- Otherwise it just sums 10 points for each player's adjacent slot that the cell attacks diagonally
- It removes 5 if the slot if already being defended by another bishop
- It also adds a random value from -5 to 5 to make it more fun
- Each turn the bishop with less value is moved, this rule intrinsically tries moves a bishop if it is being attacked by the player
- This selected piece is moved to the possible cell with greater value
- A piece can't be moved more than 3 consecutive times (to avoid entering in a infinite loop with the player)

This is a view of the possible moved for a specific bishop with the cell value displayed:

This AI was a bit sketchy sometimes, some people said they could easily win it by moving back and foward on one cell, but for some cases it showed a decent strategy of defense and attack.