Please link to where I can download the game.

@caeonosphere I cannot get out of the tutorial screen, maybe you forgot to add a button to start playing?
EDIT: sorry, I commented on the wrong game, your game is actually a lot of fun to play! Great puzzle design!

Good combinaison of two simple game but which fit together perfectly ! And nice job to make 3 IA levels during a jam :o

@jk5000 You can download it at the link provided: https://github.com/thquinn/Topplecrown/releases
Click the "Assets" dropdown at the bottom.

@dikkop I don't quite understand... if you mean the first level, you're supposed to capture the black piece to continue, or press Esc to go back to the menu. Let me know if it still gives you trouble so I can fix it!

I like the visuals and the music. The gameplay is overall simple and fun. Overall a good jam game.

:) Very fun game! The art style of the menus and the actual gameplay is great. The music is nice. Great slidey sfx. Very fun and clever puzzle mechanic! Nice level designs!

@jk5000 Thanks for following up and playing!

Very good puzzle game! The hard levels were actually very challenging. Loved it. Don't think it's easy to make AI like this.

Cool puzzler. The last levels especially put up a good challenge. Well done AI in such a game jam setting. The theme doesn't seem to be strong here though.

Enjoyed it a lot. Nice simple graphics and good music. Writing the AI is quite impressive, I know from personal experience how fun debugging a suicidal MCTS implementation can be. There was one bug I found, after playing and beating Bridge on standard it wasn't marked as beaten. Went back and beat it a few times to be sure.

@reronin Easy in some ways, not so easy in others! MCTS is super cool; I'm excited to get better at implementing it/using it in a jam setting.

@randomphantom The theme is totally weak. The idea is that you're rearranging a chessboard, typically a "stable" configuration, but yeah. A stretch.

@unpronounceable Thanks for playing and thanks for the report. I'll have a look!

I can't believe this was a compo game! Amazing entry, everything is so well polished. Great job with this. Can definitely imagine a full game with more pieces and a bigger scale.

Interesting spin on sokoban puzzlers. I thought my experience with other sokoban games like Stephens Sausage Roll or Baba Is You would help, but this is the first sokoban game I've played that pits you against an AI opponent. And what an opponent it is! I thought the chess theme would be just for aesthetics, but no, you actually have to think and strategize like a chess player in order to capture the lone king; sokoban skills alone can't save you. In this way, it's a perfect merger of the two games. Thankfully there's plenty of crossover between puzzle nerds and chess nerds, so if you build on this and flesh it out you might have a winner on your hands.

Good job on the IA. Simple mechanics, but you use it very well. Levels are really good too.

Puzzles got progressivly harder, loved the increased difficulty from easy to hard just by adding a new row. Great music and mood, well polished! Ai was on Point aswell, 3 hours well spent i would say ;) I had to battle with Ai enemies in my game aswell, can be really fun but also frustrating

For me, puzzles are always difficult)

This was a fun little puzzle game. Struggled with a number of the harder ones, but overal had a good time =D Good job!

Fun little game, the pyramid level never counts as completed on medium/hard difficulty for some reason, but otherwise no complaints :slight_smile: :thumbsup:

Wow, really enjoyed this one!


Weren't the final two levels exactly the same on normal and hard? Well I did completely forget the solution of the pyramid when playing the other levels as hard and did have to figure it out again. Though I think I ended up in a completely different solution. But the final level was as easy as the first time as the AI really likes sacrificing its rooks.

Which brings me nicely to the rooks. I really would have preferred them to actually look like rooks. The king piece crow tips looked a bit sharp too. A slight rounding would have made it look more pleasant as in real world there are really no 100% sharp edges. Other than those minor details, the game looked and sounded very eye pleasing with the calm color palette and non intrusive soundscape. Very polished stuff, kudos! 👍

The bridge on normal had a completely pointless piece too as the piece downstairs could just use the steps to get where the other one was and one rook was more than enough to deliver a mate.


The hard version then game me some grief due to the block pushing puzzle. Was this actually the intended solution, I feel like I kinda lucked into it and that the proper one would have been to build a bridge pretty much like in the normal difficulty.


The AI was surprisingly good. Well I guess it's quite straight forward to do an AI when there is only two pieces really (tops, in the majority of levels). Of course they did always unga bunga their rooks in the final level. Even on the normal one sacced em both for nothing but then on hard one they stepped it up and also took down one of mine in their double sacrifice. But of course delivering a king & rook mate especially when there are some additional walls.

I constantly did go the same route on pyramid(s) and always was wondering why they didn't pull the trigger on my free hanging rook here.


So I move up and they never crush it... 🤔


I didn't quite like how the AI practically won stales. Of course it's the way it has to be as a draw in a game like this would be impossible but they did like throwing in perpetual checks quite often. :angry:

A quicker way to restart would have been nice too. Going back to menu, scrolling to find the level etc wasn't too fun. Even could go far as have an undo functionality since the AI always did the same moves as a response anyway. Also needing to pick your piece to move every single time was annoying. Especially on the single piece levels even though the multiple ones could have also remembered your previous moved piece.

Oh yeah and for compo using existing sounds is kinda a no go (especially as is, as a part of something bigger maybe a more gray area). And so pretty much is updating the game after the jam unless there are some huge game breaking bugs. Which I wouldn't consider these...


I do notice now that you mention it and the original version (windows only though I guess) can still be dug up but mainly linking to the updated version seems kinda iffy. 🤷‍♂️

Anyways, good job! 👍

@antti-haavikko Thanks for the detailed notes! Yeah, the AI doesn't care much about material, just mates. I suppose it's just a matter of MCTS with relatively low playouts and no policy/value. I had hoped for a little better performance!

About the 0.2 changes, you're right. I changed the link and added more notices.

I like this concept of yours and maybe this should be expanded into a fuller game! As it is, it's actually enough and it's well thought out and executed.

Either way, I'm pretty sure that antti-haavikko has said everything that I need to say as well, so good job!

This is a brilliant idea combining multiple puzzle genres into one. Had a lot of fun trying to complete every level. It's amazing to see how many variations of chess are possible. Also great respect for making the AI so good. And the music is great too, amazing job!

This was very brave of you to decide to tackle an AI in the Compo game. In the result, the game is very pleasing and neat, I liked the gameplay and minimalistic graphics.

This looks like a fun game, but I have no idea how I should run it? In the assets I downloaded, there's some json and meta files. You write it's C#, so I'm guessing I should compile it somehow? What am I missing?

@drwijnen Sounds like you downloaded the source code instead of the build? The assets dropdown on the Github releases has both.

Good game, and challenging. I was unable to defeat the last level (on hard, not sure why I'd try anything else ^_^).

Very well presented game! The AI was challenging enough to be fun but not frustrating, the graphics and audio work well, and there is quite a bit of content for a jam game. I like it!

This brainteaser was a nice change of pace from the other games I've played this LD so far. The execution is very clean with a simple but effective look, and the AI is surprisingly good, considering that I'd not even dare to _attempt_ making an AI like this in a Ludum Dare setting (compo, no less!).
About the audio samples - Since you didn't make them, I think you sould have at least opted out of that category. It simply doesn't sit well with me to rate something that you didn't make in compo entry, hence why I didn't.

This game looks and feels really good. The 3D environment and the level select menu are both super beautiful, and the game controls pretty well for the most part too.

I was annoyed there was no restart button, and that losing would kick you back to the menu--a problem which is compounded by having to scroll the menu down. I also think that the piece description text boxes that come up sometimes are a little finicky. But, these are basically just nit-picks.

The gameplay and the levels themselves are both pretty neat. I like the combination of chess mechanics and box-pushing mechanics--pulling puzzle mechanics from two well-known games is a great way to make them more obvious to the player. It's especially fun to push around the blocks and destroy the enemy pieces.

I also think the AI is pretty impressive. I'm afraid I'm not smart enough to always tell when I've trapped it, but it definitely seems to do a pretty good job, overall, at putting up a fight.

Overall, really nice entry.

@honey-pony Thanks for the feedback! Agreed about the restart button and the jarring transition to the menu after losing. I just totally ran out of time. (Duh.) Hopefully I can make just a sliiiightly smaller game next LD so I have time for this kind of polish.

Honestly the AI in this is great for a compo game, like hats off to you. That's something extremely difficult to pull off, it's going to be a game I'm coming back to finish because I enjoy these puzzle games a lot. Graphics are simple but that does the job just perfectly and I found the atmosphere just perfect. Really pleasing game, highly recommended! Congrats! ^-^