Another new week of updates! news - Checkmate

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Multi-selection, a completely new options menu and a lot of more cool content from the past two weeks! :)

Posted by Quackertree on Sep 3rd, 2016

Hey all!

I didn't have the time to write a devlog last week, so today I'll be writing one for two weeks instead! I've added a couple of new, awesome features which I'd love to share with you guys!

Here's an overview:

Completely overhauled options menu
Adjusted AI & turn-based triggers
More visual indicators!
Multi-selection
Some other minor adjustments

Let's get to it!

Completely overhauled options menu

This is a big feature which I've been postponing for quite a bit, but I've finally decided to work on it last week. There are still a couple of minor bugs, but I'll fix those in the coming week.

The new menu already has a bunch of cool features, and I've got a bunch more stuff planned for it!

One thing which really makes Checkmate jump out from other strategy games, is the options menu. You're able to change (almost) every single rule in the game to however you like it. Turn on/off visual indicators, set the hunger/fatigue multiplier, adjust how long it'll take for one piece to move, set whether a piece is allowed or not.. it's all there!

Because you've got a lot of freedom, it's important to make it easy to edit everything. Therefor, I've categorized all options in seperate categories (left-hand side). You select a category, and the values you can adjust will appear in the middle of the screen. Adjusted values will turn light-blue, indicating a change. Finally, you'll be able to see all changes on the right-hand side of the screen, in a small overview.

One of the features I'm looking into adding next week, is saving/loading custom settings. This allows you to make a very hard scenario, or make it super easy, and save those settings, so you can load them in later. I'll most likely add some default settings, which you can load in super easily.

This also nicely goes together with multiplayer, as you'll be able to quickly spot the changes that have been made when joining someone!

Adjusted AI & turn-based triggers

This is something I haven't got an image of, but is important nonetheless.

I've reworked a bunch of the AI in turn-based mode. The AI previously played really defensive, but it's now also got the ability to attack you, check your king and actually win from you. This makes for a major change in gameplay and a lot more fun!

I've also adjusted the turn-based triggers. *What do I mean with that?*, simple: The game starts off in real-time, and, previously, if a piece comes too close to another piece, the real-time will switch over to turn-based mode.

This is all fine in some respect, but it can become really annoying, really quickly. You cannot properly group your pieces near the enemy borders, and if one of your pawns is scouting the area and accidentally runs near the enemy, it'll automatically trigger turn-based. This can be incredibly frustrating, and therefor, I've decided to change it completely.

Instead, I took the same triggers that Civilization V uses to check for 'War'. Either you:
a) Attack a piece/building of the enemy team
b) Walk into the enemy borders

I've gotten rid of option b here, but I've added a new one instead: Whenever you come to close to the enemy king, turn-based will automatically trigger.

More visual indicators!

I've already added a bunch of new visual indicators last week, but I've got a couple of additional ones this time!

The first one is not new, but it's an improved one. I've revised the clock model and now it looks a lot better! The old model was quite obsolete and had lots of clipping issues, whereas this one is clean and easy to see from a distance.

The second and third one are new, however! The first of the two is demonstrated in the GIF above. You're now able to see where you can move each piece to in one move! This is super useful if you've started learning the game, or during turn-based mode, so you can review all of your options!

The second of the two in the GIF is a little harder to spot! Whenever you select something, it'll now be outlined light-blue. This is true for pieces *and* buildings, which allows you to see what you're selecting with ease.

Finally, and there is no real image of this, I've adjusted the building indicators, so that they'll only show whenever you're actually building something.

Multi-selection

This is a pretty cool feature that I'm quite fond of! Multi-selecting pieces and auto-grouping them together in doing so!

It's super easy to multi-select! You just hold the multi-select key (Ctrl by default), and you drag a box from one point on the screen to another point on the screen. Every pieces within that box will be automatically selected and grouped!

Multi-selection will also inverse any current selection you've got going, so if you've selected some pieces, you'll deselect those. This allows you to easily seperate parts of groups and re-group them with other pieces!