Deal With It

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  An unfortunate position for black.

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  The amazingly designed game cards by Noah.

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  Is that a... duck? Yes it is! Deal With It can support ducks, among other fun features.

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  A very small snippet of what makes this project possible.

Inspiration

The inspiration for Deal With It was an interaction at a weekly cyber club meeting, where a handful of members were playing a chess game that had cards with it. We figured this was for learning, and thought, what if? We brainstormed and teased about playing chess where one would have a handful of cards and must select from this set to make a move. There would be cards that one could play that would alter the game in a less familiar way. This brainstorming led to the inspiration of the project before you today.

The vision

A chess game that is played using a hand of 5 cards. These cards can be basic or special and determine which moves you can play. This opens up a world of possibilities and strategies that make chess more fun and accessible to all.

How we built it

Deal With It was built using Godot and GDScript. The unique style of gameplay needed of this engine required a completely custom engine to be built from the ground-up and features utilities seen in virtually no other engines. From the highly robust internal state management using standardized formats (FEN), to the algorithms used to detect stalemate and checkmate, to the highly dynamic and adaptive nature of the engine, Deal With It promises to be what you expect and more.

Challenges we ran into

We ran in to many challenges throughout the project. Neither of us had practical experience with Godot and even lesser experience with GDScript, and much of the first day was learning the syntax and general flow of the engine. The ambitious nature of our project also began overwhelming us with the realization that there was far more than we considered, especially when taking into account the necessity of creating a completely custom backend for the chess logic.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to create such a full chess engine in something we had little experience with. There is so much to learn, but we proved we could get somewhere with so little knowledge.

What we learned

Divide and conquer. Learning how to divide tasks into smaller sections tremendously helped our productivity, especially in the beginning. We learned how to effectively manage and budget our time such that features would come out right when we needed them to continue. We also used Git for version control and can proudly say that we are not only more proficient with it, but with good communication we had zero merge conflicts or other hiccups.

What's Next for Deal With It

The plan for Deal With It is to rewrite the engine perhaps in Unity. This would provide us with a more familiar engine and more typical platform for development. This will help to create something that can easily be modified, and have much better structure than the current implementation which has seen some limitations due to the deadline. On top of this, it would be cool to add more cards, and really dive deeper into how much we can change the game of chess.

Built With

• gdscript
• godot