Nobody has asked about the how the idea behind “the Whole World is in Check” came to be, but it’s still a good practice to keep a devlog. It’s good content, and it’s smart to have this all written, maybe one day it will come in handy.

So, starting from way back, I have been a fan of videogames since I can remember. And I learned principles of code when I was very young. I intended to study programming as a career, but the videogame industry was nonexistent in my country, and also at that time, I saw programming as a dead end career in my country. For context, I grew up in a third world country with little to no access to internet. As a result, while I’ve been playing videogames all my life, I knew nothing about the existence of the indie scene. I played indie games like Hollow Knight, Cuphead, Titan Souls without knowing they were indie.

I left my home country a few years ago, and I heard for the first time about indiedevs and games that were made by just a few persons, or solo in some cases. And of course, the gamer in me that knows a little bit of coding wanted to try. So I picked up Unity and started watching youtube videos and tutorials.

Initially I wanted to make an RTS game, because I like Age of Empires 2 (AOE2) a lot. But every indie gamedev youtuber will tell you that you should start small, and that is the single best advice you can ever get. I don’t remember which one (I think Thomas Brush) was saying that you should get your first game idea and cut it in half, and then, in half again. So I took my RTS idea and halved it, and thought of a turn based strategy game like Advance Wars (AW). And then halved it again, and came up with a turn based strategy game based in Chess.

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Ok, but let me explain the logic behind all these halving. The general idea is that you don’t start with something too ambitious that you will never see the end of it. Both AOE2 and AW are very complex games, but both had something that I really liked: you can play with different civilizations (or Characters in AW) and the bonuses and perks that you get will depend from it. And that was the main thing I wanted to keep in my game.

The Chess set up was ideal because Chess is always played with the same pieces and the same board. That was the part that would simplify a lot the game and make it so I don’t go too ambitious for my own good. After all, I’m doing gamedev in my spare time.

Chess is pretty much a perfect balanced game. I wanted to do a game based on Chess, but not a Chess game, cause there is already a lot of good chess games to play. This is when mechanics like having HP and ATK appeared. These are what make the Sets be different from each other, so one has stronger knights, while the other has stronger bishops and so. Obviously, this part is directly inspired by AOE2 and AW. This also makes the game more casual than Chess.

I took a lot of inspiration from fairy chess pieces (pieces based on chess that aren’t on the game) and unorthodox chess games, I didn’t want to copy any, but I do like the ideas behind the different moves that fairy pieces have. Ralph Betza designed a game where you can pick different Sets of pieces, sounds familiar? Ralph Betza is basically the reason I didn’t just change some pieces and called it a day, I wanted to do something different. But I did like the notion of Unique Pieces and Sets having different sets of pieces.

While in Betza’s chess every Set other than the original is fully made of Fairy Pieces, I wanted to make it so regular pieces can have additional moves depending on the Set. I also have a Unique Piece for each set, a little reminiscing from the Unique Unit of AOE2. And I also liked the idea of making the game more dynamic by getting bonuses when you have taken a certain number of pieces or the King has low HP. Speaking of which, having a killable King was another way to make the game more casual and different from regular Chess, more akin to some TRPGs.

Being that I choose to name the sets after countries, I named the game "World War Chess". Which I still think sounds cool, but it turns out that another game was already called that way, an old game. And it’s very difficult to find a new original name for a Chess game, everything is taken. That’s how it got changed to “the Whole World is in Check”, cool, fitting to the game and unique enough to not be similar to anything else.

The gameplay is not set in stone, there are things that may change, always in the spirit of making the game more enjoyable. The Unique pieces, being that are only obtained by promoting pawns, are probably not seeing enough gameplay. And that is just not in par with the intention of having a signature piece for every Set. Another revision is about the way attacks and stats work, it is too easy to fall in the trap of just playing this as a Chess game but with additional steps to take a piece. So there may be a change in gameplay design there. Still, I think that would be a better subject for another devlog, as it sounds like the future, and this one was all about the past.