Allright, I'm gonna tell you something about our project "MechaChess". That's the working title, I think we'll figure out something better somewhen.

The game combines traditional chess with EarthSiege2-style mech combat. The game starts with chess and every time a piece tries to strike an enemy one, a battle starts. Each piece is represented by a mech whose properties and equipment (such as weapons, armor and speed) correspond to the attributes which the pieces in chess have.

In addition to that, each kind of mech has a special module which also corresponds to its chess piece attributes. The pawn gets a strafe module, the knight gets a jump/flight module, the tower gets an extra armor and so on. Of course these modules consume energy, so they can't be activated all the time.

We are trying to get the game running on three platforms: Win32, Linux and Mac.

We're working with Delphi, I'm using Delphi 7, the others use Delphi 2006, I think. We try not to use any of Delphi's standard units (except System.pas, of course ) and we use OpenGL for the graphic stuff, SDL for the platform independence and Newton for realistic physical behaviour.

This is one of our most important aims: Making the whole thing realistic. Well, as realistic as a science fiction game can be. We want the mechs to walk physically correct and to be blown up physically correct.

When we got that stuff working and still have some time left, we're gonna try to put some simulation in it: The player should be able to choose weapons, armor and change the mechs configuration within some constraints. This will make the whole thing a little more flexible and add a decent strategical part.


These are my current thoughts to the project. It's definitely the largest and most difficult project I've ever been working on. At first I did not think I'd be the lead programmer, I rather thought DGL-Luke would be that. But for some reason, I am now the lead programmer and I have written some fair code in these one and a half weeks. Let's see what we can make out of that.

Thank you for reading that.