Some suggests to improve the game

[Marco]

Hello everyone,
I installed the game yesterday and played a few chess and checkers games.

This game is nice, however it needs some quality of life improvements.

- Color choice must be added so you can choose what side to play before the match. In chess, you always play as white and in checkers you always play as black. Not that I dislike that, but other players might want to play well as both sides or they just would want to learn to play as white checkers or black chess.

- Add moves' history and also the possibility to undo moves or to restart the game. This could also be useful to save PDNs of every game to watch later.

- Graphics are nice even on low details (I mean, personally I liked the models and the boards), but graphic parameters must be added to at least correct contrast, brightness and the lightning effects. That's because on some room types there may occur some difficulty in distinguishing black pieces (especially when using the column board), or there are too bright rooms where black is well visible but white might blend on the illuminated board (mostly when using the flat one). This happens both on chess and checkers (at times it is hard to distinguish between man and king) when using fixed views. Yes, there's the possibility to abuse Key 6 (freelook) to see pieces from different angles, but this might distract the player in the long run if they are playing against skilled AI, for example.

- Crashes may occur sometimes and these must be fixed. Also, sometimes the ESC menu might freeze or options just don't work when clicking on them (despite F1 still work and help menu appears and disapears if you press it while ESC menu is open).

- Checkers AI seems pretty weak at a first glance. Played a few games vs. level 5, 6 and 7 and I won easy. I'll try to play vs. higher AI levels. As opposed to chess AI which seems pretty hard for me at level 5.

- Aesthetical changes / Cosmetics. It would be really cool to add flat chess pieces, you could put cosmetics on a separate DLC if base game is planned to remain a demo.

There would be other ideas, but I think it's enough. Maybe you could also consider to add timed games, I mean a max time required for every move, or simply a total countdown that stop everytime you complete a legal move like there are on some browser games. Example: a 10 min game, you complete your first move within 15 seconds and now 9:45 remains and so on.

Thank you devs for your attention if you read this. I like the concept.

[Marco]

UPDATE:

- Draw rules must be added for checkers. For example, I played a match against AI at level 9 or 10 and the game could never end despite repeating the same moves over and over. When the same move is repeated three times involving the same pieces, the game must end in a draw.
I haven't tested this on chess yet, but I assume that the rule could be missing on chess as well.

- Once the game automatically ended in a draw when both AI and me remained with one king left on the checkerboard after a capture. Is this on purpose? Because in a one king vs one king situation there's still a possibility that one player can win if their opponent makes a mistake.

- At times, especially when playing BO3 in checkers, AI keeps thinking after I captured its last piece so the next round doesn't start.