To celebrate the 1-year anniversary of Gigachess on Steam, there's a bunch of new stuff added in this update! :D
GIGACHESS V1.09 CHANGELOG
- Pawn advance has been greatly improved, Pawns now descend row-by-row in cascading fashion making it much easier to follow what's happening during the enemy's movement phase
- Cursed Pawns introduced -- at random, a Pawn on the board will be affected by a curse indicated by a swirling purple wisp and any hero piece that captures this cursed Pawn will be transformed into a King with single-step 8-way movement for the following turn (more info below!)
- A turn advance stopper has been added, allowing the player to disable the automatic turn advance when their last hero piece is moved (click the buttons at either side of the turn advance button to activate the stop switch)
- In the turn immediately before a Pawnwarp's timed triggering during an Endless game, an additional reminder now appears on-screen during that turn
- Hero pieces being threatened during the enemy's movement phase now receive a bolder warning outline to draw attention to their threatened state
- A connected gamepad now only activates upon input being registered as opposed to taking priority over the mouse at start-up
- If a gamepad is detected at launch, a friendly window indicating that fact now appears
- The sound effect for quick-target Pawn blocking when using a gamepad changed
- Viper Pawns entering the board's endzone now flash as they do when a Shieldguard Vipedown is triggered
- A helpful tip window now appears near the start of an Endless game reminding the player of the availability of gamesaving and undo, this will never appear again once clicked through
- Queen-up states for each hero piece have been given new, much fancier-looking powered-up sprites
- All manually-triggered tooltips are now attached to the cursor as opposed to having fixed locations relevant to the object being queried
- A small memory leak occurring with Endless game restart fixed
The introduction of Cursed Pawns that inflict King-downs on any hero piece that captures them is a mechanic I hope you enjoy! It's one that I've been mulling over for ages and it adds a little bit of spice to what the enemy has to offer. The King-down curse isn't necessarily a detriment, the single-step 8-way movement can be used strategically to get a hero piece into a position they might otherwise be unable to access. Just like how Viper Pawns downgrade to regular Pawns when they enter the bottom two rows of the board, Cursed Pawns will lose their curse in exactly the same way. Give Endless mode a try, get cursed and let me know what you think!
The cascading Pawn advance is arguably the bigger addition, though! This took extensive reworking of the game's collision but it's working perfectly as of now, the enemy phase is much more entertaining to watch after this change and it really does make it easier to keep track of what all those Pawns are doing.
The first year of Gigachess on Steam has been a good time! The game has come a heck of a long way since launch and I very much appreciate everyone who's taken an interest, I hope you all continue to have some fun with it :)
As always, your bug reports and feedback on the community forums are a huge help! Thanks for playing Gigachess <3 http://steamcommunity.com/app/415910/discussions