Our Engineering Open House 2007 project was an interactive combat chess game where the pieces come to life and battle for supremacy of the chessboard. The game features unique moving/attacking animations for each piece, a weapon associated with each piece, a combat environment. The project was developed by 12 programmers and artists with no game engine utilized.
This project was inspired by the chess scenes in Harry Potter and in Star Wars and by the original Battle Chess game by Interplay. The game was developed by a group of about 12 ACM SIGGRAPH members utilizing no game engine. The project was designed to allow our novice members to test the skills they learned in our weekly tutorial sessions.
The project was also developed for the CANVAS: Collaborative Advanced Navigation Virtual Art Studio, at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign. The CANVAS is an interactive, immersive environment space where users can view three-dimensional images through special glasses. For the CANVAS we developed an interface where two players compete at a real chessboard. A web-cam then records images at the end of each player's turn, analyses them, and moves the player's piece automatically. Thus the players can compete on a real chessboard and watch the results of their pieces coming to life and battling in a 3-dimensional environment. (Due to scheduling difficulties Chess v. 2.0 was not installed into the CANVAS).
- Battle Scenes - Pieces take on a life of their own. The pieces must battle for ultimate domination of the chess board. Each piece has certain kill animations, including a unique weapon, associated with them (Mortal Kombat style). Pieces are modeled/textured in Maya and animated in Milkshape.
- Randomly Generated Terrain - Terrain is different each run of the program, randomly created and procedurally textured.
- Sound - Sounds attached to animation, to make the environment more immersive.
- Skybox Environment - Skybox adds to the realism of the environment.
- Messaging System - Humorous messages inform players when a battle takes place.
- Real Chessboard Interface - Player compete on a real chessboard and through the use of a web-cam their moves are relayed to the virtual environment.
- Orthographic Interface - Alternate interface, so players can compete at home using only a mouse.