Challenge 1 - 3D Chess - Part 1

It's been awhile since my initial blog post back on February 24th 2019 about this challenge, and sadly I've been unable to work much on the project since. I did however finish the basic prototype version in March using C++ and UE4, then I did the newer graphics in April, and I've been sitting on this for a few weeks to publish.... but here it is! For those just seeing this for the first time these are challenges I'm setting without any time limit but I must program, make all the graphical and audio assets myself from scratch. Enjoy Part 1!

(Rendered in Blender - game shots are all in UE4)

The first stage for me was to make a very bare bones prototype, and get all the functional features set up such as movement, capturing, square highlighting, and the basic GUI.

At this stage the only things I needed to code in are the 'check' and 'checkmate' checkers, as well as game over and winner screens. This hasn't been done yet, but will be done in part 2!

The next step was to make the basic scene pieces for the game. I deiced to keep everything as low poly as possible, and I would make up for it in textures.

I started with the table first:

Then the chessboard which is very basic:

Then the walls:

And for the floor tiles I took a square did an extrude with scaling then used an array to fill it:

Then all the chess pieces:

Now I was ready to start on texturing! All of these textures were done procedurally. Some of them I added in parameters for randomization for certain parts. You'll notice this with the floor tiles.

The wall material:

Then the floor material:

The chessboard wood material (for the squares I utilized my UV cuts and did an overlap):

The table wood material:

The GUI is still very basic and there are some "wrapping" problems I need to fix. After putting this all together and using basic materials for the chess pieces I came to this from the basic prototype seen above.

(Images are at 50% scale)

[Video Demo - best watched in 1080p] - I still need to fix the moves list wrapping.

At this stage I have the following left to finish:

- Check and Checkmate code

- Game Over / Winner screen

- Fix moves list wrapping

- Redo GUI look

- Music

- SFX

- (Possible Basic AI based on 'value' moving) *Only if I have time as I want to move onto the next challenge.

For part 2 I will be pulling out my midi controller and hopefully make a decent basic tune, and some sound effects for chess movement, capture, and check / checkmate, and game over. I will also finish up the remaining coding the GUI changes!