Fire Chess

The Art of the Game

My game is a mixture of games that I had recently viewed or played: Fire Emblem and Chess. I have been playing a lot of Fire Emblem where the purpose of the game is to build and control an army to defeat the enemy army which also has a tie in to chess where you know all of your pieces and then you use them to capture the enemy King. I mainly wanted to build a game like Fire Emblem, but it would be difficult with the limitations of Claude, so for the mechanics I chose to use a simple moveset that everyone knows, Chess, especially since I just watch a video that had a good Chess player defeat 7 normal players at the same time.

Since the mechanics are based off of Chess, most people know how the pieces move and can understand from looking, how to play the game. Later in the game, you move on from a pawn to get stronger pieces or have more pieces. However, the enemy also grows as you do until their army is either stronger or greater than yours. To stop the enemy from being too strong, I allowed the player to upgrade or recruit, a total of two times after a certain point. However, this made the player too strong, but without, the game became slightly boring as it ended with either very few pieces or just pawns. To fix this, I made it so that the enemy upgrades by two a turn, but without the ability to have starting queens to not have the enemy too strong. Another change was that rooks or queens could easily kill things at the beginning, so I added a spawn protection, so that if a piece hasn’t moved two turns from the start, they aren’t able to be captured. This was mainly to stop rooks from being too strong. Finally, I also added a turn limit, because for certain situations with a king-knight, or king-bishop, it would be hard to find the win without the AI opponent giving it to you, which would cause frustration. The turn limit win would be decided if you have more material than the opponent and would increase the bigger the board size becomes. This was because the 4x4 was the easiest to be in a king-knight or king-bishop situation and should end rather quickly, but the 6x6 and 7x7 boards were too much to let it have a 20-turn limit. However, since the final goal of an 8x8 is to checkmate, it would not be as fun to have a turn limit, so I added a forfeit button as you have to beat the final level with dominance to win. For the art, I first started off with making a Chess board, which Claude made really easily. However, it looked like a modification of Chess which was a boring project to make, so to make it more like Fire Emblem, I tried to have Claude create images in the style of the older GBA games. The result was very bad, even with references. So, I looked on the internet to see if there were any open-source materials and I found someone who had recreated the sprites that I was looking for laid out in a PNG. I then had Claude substitute Chess icons with the icons which I thought represented the pieces the best. ​

My main prompt was:

“Build a single file HTML arcade game called "chess-roguelike"The game starts off with a 3x3 grid board and each side starts with a king on each side but the player also starts with a pawn, there is access to all chess pieces, but it is not shown yet. the goal is to kill the other king, and keep your king alive. the pieces just need to capture, not checkmate. after the player wins, the player has an option to gain another pawn or upgrade their pawn to a knight or bishop; their knight/bishop to a rook, or a rook to a queen. After every win, the enemy will also gain a new pawn. After two wins, the enemy will upgrade a piece like the player. Every round the board will increase to a 4x4, 5x5, and so on until an 8x8 chess board. Once the board becomes a 8x8, the player will have to checkmate the enemy to complete the game. the vibe so far is like chess.com Requirements: everything in one .html file — no external images, no audio

files, no CDN links, no installation. Draw all graphics with canvas and

synthesize any sound with the Web Audio API. Keyboard controls, shown on

screen. Include a score and a game-over state”

This prompt included almost everything I wanted and Claude made what I wanted since I was very specific in the prompt. Afterwards, I only made balancing or art style tweaks like: “change the description to "Turn Limit" instead of "Turn 30"; for 3x3, 4x4, and 5x5, the turn limit should be 20, for 6x6 and 7x7, it should be 25, and for 8x8 it is unlimited” One change that I didn’t ask for and Claude did was when I was asking for a queen limit during upgrading to stop the player from being too strong, Claude also made it so that the promotion would become a rook instead of a queen if the player already had a queen.

For what I believe in owning, I only own the idea of the game since, as of now, I don’t know any other game with this concept. However, everything else, was if I paid a worker to make since I don’t know how this was coded and I don’t know how to create sprite art. Therefore, I believe the game mainly belongs to Claude/Northeastern as they are the ones creating/paying for the code. The sprite work was found in a replicated free site, so I definitely don’t have ownership of that. However, since this game is just for a school project/for fun and not to be made commercially, I believe that what I have done is fine.

AI Disclosure: I have used Claude for almost everything for this homework except for art design and the ideas. The art came from a free website recreation of an older game and the background for the game was Chess.com. This project took around 30 iterations, however after the fifth iteration, the changes were mainly slight balance adjustments I would get after a friend would playtest the game. Overall, the project was fun to make and I think my game is somewhat fun and my friends who have playtested it also agreed.