Idea
I had a particularly busy week ahead of me this week, so I wanted to work on a game that wouldn’t take too much thought or work.
As I’m a naturally clumsy person, it only seemed natural to finally delve into the idea of making a game about knocking stuff over when trying not to. With that vague idea in my head, an online conversation with a friend eventually lead to the idea of creating a game of chess, but with big clumsy animal hands instead (which resulted in this very intelligent exchange).
I wanted to make a game of chess where you had to control the hands similarly to Surgeon Simulator, and force the player to exist in a situation where you can very easily knock everything over and mess it all up.
What went right
This week’s game was another exercise in just creating something fun and entertaining. I wouldn’t say I got as much joy out of creating this game as I did with week 34‘s, but I still just had a fun time making it. I needed a little bit of a break from the networking learning and had a super limited amount of time to work on this week’s game – and this was a nice little break.
What went wrong
As I was limited with my time this week, there were a lot of features that didn’t quite make it in. Some of them I think may have been for the better, but some I’m a bit disappointed in. These features include snapping all upright pieces to a valid spot after a move is completed, determining whether either player is in check or checkmate, and (if I was feeling up for it) a way to include networked multiplayer. I think that the determining check/checkmate would have been a very useful feature, but otherwise, I’m okay with the other features being passed over. Having the pieces snap to a grid space felt as though it would take a lot away from the intentional clumsiness of the game – and networking was simply beyond what my brain could handle this last week.
What I learned
I’m not sure what I learned this week – this was just a fun game about playing chess with bear hands. I didn’t do anything revolutionary or out of my realm of knowledge (not that I’ve ever played chess with a bear, mind you…), and I didn’t push myself in any real way. The biggest thing I learned this week is that chessboards are only 8×8, not 9×9 – which I unfortunately learned after spending an hour or so laying out all of my grid and pieces 😐