King of Nothing by notapixelstudio
King of nothing.
A chess-based rhythm chess where you play as the white king that lost all the pieces of the army. You have nothing.
Earn every piece back one beat at a time in a scrolling chessboard.
Disclaimer: Check the devlog to know the development we did after the submission and take that in consideration for voting. Feedbacks are more important than votes for us :)
How to play
Earn every piece back one beat at a time in a scrolling chessboard. Move around at 120bpm with directional arrows or WASD (8 directions) - if you miss the beat the king won't move .
The black pieces will notice you when you are in check (you step on cell they menace) and will attack you in the next beat:
How to Win/lose
The purpose of the game is to reconquer all the army that is represented by the UI below the screen. You need to capture at least 8 pawns, 2 bishops, 2 knights, 2 rook and 1 queen - order is not relevant.
You lose if you get eaten by a black piece (after a check). You lose if you fall behind the scrolling grid.
Devlog
v0.2.2 - one week later - Thanks to @Derek we added music. Added Mobile support with touchscreen buttons instead of swipe. Better Rhythm handling.
v0.2.1 - two days later: added mobile support with swipe to move (synchronization with visual and sound feedback needs improvement, maybe calibration? -not implemented yet)
V0.2-a day later: major bug fixes and gameplay improvements: added metronome sound and UI visual feedback of the tick. Better movement feeling. Black pieces notify now check and will move accordingly. Add win condition. Add gameover condition.
V0.1-submission: time was short for us for this submission. The king moves at 120bpm with the input. Scrolling chessboard, black pieces will appear from the above row. Black piece Attack won't work :( . No win condition, no gameover condition. Video of the first submission build (you can find the build it on itch.io page as well): https://twitter.com/notapixelstudio/status/1181382421595508736?s=09
known issues
- if you don't move and the grid scrolls without a move, you don't die.
Credits and acknowledgements
- Godot
- Textreme - ui visual feedback for rhythm control is from this project! (need link )
- whoever invented chess
- Crypt of the necrodancer for reference
- chess pursuit (lichess.org/404)
- @derek-volker - for the music
Have fun
The game is available for all laptop OS, web and android
There is no music, just the sound of the metronome. I could not find a good music at 120bpm that fits well and that was free :) I suggest to put on this playlist. It's really fun: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/48qVMsDfYdILVXkR5kop6L?si=uJAi37z3TsqfTufJjayh9A
Ratings
| Overall | 173th | 3.885⭐ | 89🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 115th | 3.908⭐ | 89🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 22th | 4.305⭐ | 89🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 452th | 3.436⭐ | 88🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 512th | 3.592⭐ | 89🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 532th | 2.779⭐ | 79🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 546th | 3.346⭐ | 83🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 33🗳️ | 23🗨️ |
Graphics are actually rough not really polished :) chess pieces are maybe easy to do it :)
Thank you for finding the time to try it :)
One Issue I had was that the audio cue didn't seem to quite align with the moment I actually had to click for me. From what I gather from other rhythm games though, that is often caused by differences in hardware. (crypt of the necrodancer here has a huge tolerance window to make up for this, osu! instead lets the user customise the timing to make it match). It wasn't so big an issue to make it unplayable, just a bit unintuitive, so something that could be optimised.
If you want, i can produce a track for your game (free of charge), but i can only work on this tonight (in 9 hours or so). In my soundcloud you can check my work (i usually produce classical, metal, electronic and 16-bit songs):
https://soundcloud.com/derek-volker-413758721/
Congratulations on your game!
Thanks for playing
1. Endless mode: your score is counted in pawns (pawn1 bishop/knight3 rook5 queen9) so you can go for a highscore.
2. Hard mode: you loose if you make an illegal chess move. You'd have to find a way to deal with the queen tho. like making her move on her own next to you sometimes, or having hardmode only for endless and simply accept that you can never capture the queen. (In that case hard mode might actually be decent training for ultra bullet chess)
Also please play and rate some games yourself. This comunity relies on everyone doing their part :)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jLBGal2RoNSaBH9ObqXCCAtFNP3Y9I3m/view?usp=sharing
Its a 120bpm piece, looped and with heavy emphasys on the beat. I hope you like it and it fulfill your expectations regarding a song for the game.
Timing was a bit off for me on the HTML version, with the correct timing feeling closer to the offbeats than the on-beats. Wasn't really a problem once I adjusted to it, though.
Felt like it was unlikely you'd lose assuming you stayed on the beat, but I'm not sure what could be done to fix that within the theme - maybe just a hard mode with significantly faster scrolling, or an endless mode that speeds up?
Thank you for your feedback! :)
@nordicebear : Godot Rulez! We went for simple rules and rhythm that pushes to make immediate moves, pushing you into making mistakes :) Thank you man.
@nordicebear: Thanks to @Derek we put the music on. And improved the sync with audio/visual feedback. Thank you for your kind words :)
@lunardust: Thank you! :)
@konomizure: We made an update in which we put the music made by @derek-volker. Give it another go. Audio/visual feedback is improved as well.
@jolett: Thank you !
@ausstein: These are really good advice. We were thinking on level design to make the black pieces appear in a always more difficult way. The movement of the queen is what made us realize the actual rhythm movement, and it gives us some headache. It might be a good thing the fact that you CANNOT take the queen in the *hard-mode* :) Thank you very much for your advice.
@kazatan: Exactly what we wanted to achieve in this small game! :)
@purrseus: Thank you, too kind :)
@kuviman: Thank you. Give it another try. We updated with a better feeling. :) we will keep improving a little by little.
@susumu-asaga: THank you man!
@ancient-pixel: Yeah, there was a bit of lag with the audio/visual feedback. Now with the v.0.2.2 we added mobile support and better audio/visual feedback handling. Give it another go and let us know if you can :)
@humphreysmedia: There is some feedback when you hit the movement at the right time. Isn't enough? Maybe something like: "Great!" "Bravo" "Amazing" ? Well since you tried it, it is my pleasure to tell you that "YOU ARE AMAZING!" - true story :)
Thank you guys. A big shout out to @derek-volker that provided a song for this short silly game we made for this jam. And Thank you guys for trying
Interesting idea, but as it is, trivial except for the following the rhythm. I'd drop rhythm part and try to make core gameplay more complex. But that's me:)
Also, was surprised that king does not walk diagonally.
@nick-parry which system is that? Web? What browser? Try chrome. Or download the build. Or try Android build. Let me know. And thanks for trying it out :)
@mccarlp thank you. Yeah it's hard to find the right tuning for the beat. Not an easy task. It might need a calibration step, but this goes too far out of the scope of the jam. We keep trying to improve gameplay feeling though. Stay tuned :) and thank you so much :)
Sometimes it feels like you really follow the music but it can't move... Played the HTML5 version
The experience overall was complete and qualitative. I the rythm is good, pretty easy to get (but I'm playing music as a hobby so maybe I'm not the good client to stress that part).
Slick design, solid execution. Nice entry, well done!
So, I took probably the most familiar game of all where you start with a lot and end with much less, and though about how you can change the rules so you really start with nothing.
I liked it how you put the pieces in a way that when you eat one piece, you get attacked by the next one. Made the concept very clear!
(Though it was already clear from the gifs).
The game itself was not very challenging, but that's ok for a jam game which is dedicated to experimentation with new things. Maybe you could put a lot more pieces together, and make their attack logic more fuzzy, so you will need to be aware which pieces actually attack you and avoid them.
Nice work!
Unfortunately I struggled with the rhythm a bit, and spent my first few playthroughs playing like a Wazir because I didn't consider that I could move diagonally- thanks I think to using orthagonally laid out controls (which is really just a quirk of keyboards) and my ingrained instinct from playing Necrodancer. That's all on me, though, ahah.
The graphics look polished with the nice rhythm bounces, too.
Really nice work!
There were some bugs, that were frustrating to me. For example sometimes there is no one beat gap between enemy noticing me and me moving away, so the enemy hits me even I reacted properly. Also, sometimes I am killed before the enemy even touches me.
But for me your idea is brilliant.
Very innovative
And same as above a lot of diff with the rythm maybe i have no skill in necrodancer like ;)
But i suggest to extend the windows for check the tempo and increase diffculty with more enemies
i had a bug : no gameover after losing (on last html5 version)
anyway its a solid entry ;)
Wow, this has got to be one of the best ideas that I have come across this LD. What a novel concept, and the best part is that it just works... Really well!
I would really love an infinite version where it becomes harder and harder, with a highscore (and maybe release on mobile). If you decide to develop this further please @me, I would love to check it out! :smiley:
I think be better when there is no scrolling and camera follow to the player.
Thank you all guys for your kind words.
This is our game:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/soundscapes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuH6eYQ45lg
In a word, consider Tetris. What forces the pace of that game is the speed with which pieces drop. Now, imagine if in Tetris, in order to move a piece, you _also_ had to press the arrow keys in rhythm. This wouldn't make Tetris better; it would make it a lot worse. That's your situation. The idea of rhythm-based chess is really cool, but it's not helping your game. Your game has something even cooler than rhythm based chess, which is pace-driven board "reading" in what feels like an adventure context. Truly, this could be brilliant. I'd buy it.
I was doing pretty well in this game! Until a rook came into camera view and immediately defeated me. Whoops! ;P
That aside this is pretty small but still kinda clever and fun. As noted the scrolling design seemed a little unnecessary, I wonder how this would work with that aspect nixed entirely, instead having fixed board configurations that you'd try to defeat with just your king. I believe this would also let you scale the difficulty over time as well as provide checkpoints since you'd have different levels. I'd imagine things might (?) get pretty tricky later on with dense piece configurations.
My brain is also curious what this might feel like with movement sets other than just the King's -- for example maybe a character that can only move by two squares at a time. Totally pulling this out of my butt though, that might be a horrible design in practice!
Nice job!
My only issue was the music wasn't quite syncing up with the gameplay. I expect that was because I was playing it in a browser but I eventual got used to it.
I really enjoyed it! Clean design, juicy gameplay, great job!