Releasing Pawn-Up as a full-fledged app – OK, its still a bit rough around the edges for its V1.0, but I’m releasing it on Itch.io as a “Pay What You Want” app in the hopes of getting some feedback. This is a new angle for me, but we can’t go through life throwing $100 bills at Steam or Apple for every app we can create only to find there’s not strong interest in it.
What is Pawn-Up!?
Pawn-Up! started with the idea of what if every Chess piece was the same, but you had a deck of cards that you drew hands from that gave you the movement choices allowed for that round. As you play through the cards, you must protect your king-piece and attempt to capture the opponent’s king piece. At any time, if you don’t like the cards in your hand, you can draw a new one, but you can only do that 3 times a match.
In creating Pawn-Up!, one of the more challenging parts was making the computer player adhere to the same rules as the human player – so, just like the human player, it starts the game with a shuffled deck, drawing cards a hand a time, and limiting its choices to those cards while attempting to protect its king. There’s definitely some room for improvement, but it plays well enough that you’ll sometimes lose and that was frankly my initial goal.
One of the other interesting facets about Pawn-Up! is that, in theory, it could pretty easily be a physical board game – but lets not get ahead of ourselves – a board game is even more expensive to produce than paying Apple or Steam’s developer fees!