Prototype Downloadable Now

Early prototype of the core gameplay is out! (Almost) all art assets are placeholders, but it is playable, and that's all that matters :)

I wanted to make it playable in the browser, but it seems like WebGL doesn't support multithreading yet. So for my AI to work at all, it had to be built as an executable.

This prototype only includes the core board game mechanics of Ludochess. All pieces are basic with no abilities (which will be added in the following two weeks). The tournament and shop mechanics will be introduced gradually over the next three weeks as well. When you open the game, all pieces on each side will be chosen randomly, and a random piece on each side will become the Lord. It will not be part of the final experience, in which you would be able to pick and choose what to use from your own pool of pieces.

While building this prototype, I realized that my original idea of rolling the dice for attacks and defenses disturbs the flow with the dice rolls, and there is not really a good way to combat this uncertainty during the gameplay, I remove this feature and made the attack and defense values of the pieces a constant. Now it becomes easier for the player to plan their moves, as they can focus on positioning their pieces.

I'm using minimax at a depth of 4 for the AI in this demo - which is actually not smart at all, especially with the way it evaluates the game states. Calculating any deeper than that will stall the game for longer than I'd like, so that's the version of AI we have here. That's also something to look into, but probably only in the last week of the Greenlight Jam. 

For the BGM, I intended to use "Montague and Capulets", also known as "Dance of the Knights", by Sergei Prokofiev, which I cannot believe is still not in public domain everywhere in the world just yet.  So I took it out just to be safe.

Any feedback and critique is welcomed here!