Murder on the Chessboard

Chess meets murder mystery! Solve the murder cases by logical deduction.

When and where did the murder happen?

Who has murdered the king?

Rules

Find the perpetrator along with the time & room of the murder!

Rule of Movement

Each piece moves every time step according to their standard chess rules. Multiple pieces can occupy the same square.

Rule of Darkness

During darkness, the sound icons indicate places where at least one piece has moved to.
Corpses make no sound.

Rule of Murder

The murder happened in darkness a room where the king was alone with exactly one other piece (the perpetrator wanted no witnesses).


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Made by Vadim (varzival) mynerdyhobby.com

Powered by PixiJS

Updated 14 days ago
StatusPrototype
PlatformsHTML5
Rating
Rated 4.7 out of 5 stars
(13 total ratings)
AuthorVarzival
GenrePuzzle
Made withPixiJS
Tags2D, Chess, mobile, Singleplayer, Touch-Friendly
Average sessionAbout a half-hour
InputsMouse, Touchscreen
LinksBlog
ContentNo generative AI was used

Development log

Comments

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(1 edit) (+1)

The atmosphere is really nice, animations, soundtrack and artstyle are very polished. Initial tutorial guides are very clear, but once I need to drag figures it gets unclear (apart from finding the place where figure should be), also when there is first hint about dragging a figure, it occured on a brown field which doesn't allow dragging, so it took me a while to zoom out and zoom in to blue desk, expected tutorial to be a bit more precise on which actions to perform where. Unfortunatelly wasn't able to finish tutorial (after I moved all figures to fields marked as '?' I didn't get part with another set of figures to place), hope this helps and good luck with the game! Idea seems very creative and has potential!

Thank you for trying the tutorial and for your feedback! I'd like to clarify a couple of things:

> when there is first hint about dragging a figure, it occured on a brown field which doesn't allow dragging, so it took me a while to zoom out and zoom in to blue desk
=> Does that mean that it was not intuitive for you that the piece needs to be dragged on the blue board?

> Unfortunatelly wasn't able to finish tutorial (after I moved all figures to fields marked as '?' I didn't get part with another set of figures to place)
=> so you've made it to the part where it says "Good luck detective!" and weren't able to proceed?

Working on making the tutorial more clear and intuitive so this feedback is super valuable. Thanks again! 

> Does that mean that it was not intuitive for you that the piece needs to be dragged on the blue board?

=> Yes it wasn't clear, even though I read each step.

> so you've made it to the part where it says "Good luck detective!" and weren't able to proceed?

=> I remember how I set all figures to '?' fields and got next set of figures, wasn't clear what to do while previous figures remain on same places, moved few figures and since there is no any response dropped. 

I hope my feedback helps, I'd recommend to come up with a shorter version of tutorial, so even without reading it could be clear what to do, good luck again! Will be happy to provide you feedback if/when you update it.

Thank you for clarifying! 

I will definitely to continue working on making the tutorial more accessible (not in the next update but in the near future).

So I'll gladly ping you once I'm there ;-) Good luck with Dilock in the meantime, I'm hungry for more puzzles!!

(+1)

Is there a duplicate solution in scenario 31? Rot-13:

Hfvat abezny qrqhpgvbaf, V trg gung:

* ng gvzr sbhe gur guerr pryyf va ernqvat beqre ner dhrra, ebbx xvat, xavtug ovfubc

* ng gvzr svir gur gjb pryyf ba gur yrsg ner ebbx naq xavtug

Ubj pna V gryy gung gur ebbx qvqa'g zheqre gur xvat ng gvzr sbhe, naq gura gur xvat jnyxrq bire gb gur xavtug'f pryy gb or zheqrerq ng gvzr svir? Be jnyx jvgu gur ebbx gb gur gbc yrsg pryy naq trg zheqrerq ol gur ebbx ng gvzr svir vafgrnq bs gvzr sbhe?

Haha your comment is a puzzle itself :D
So the implicit rule - and I might have not made that clear enough in the tutorial & rules section - is that pieces will murder the king if they are alone with him in one room. So since, as you've indicated, the king must have been alone with a piece in one room at time x, he couldn't have been murdered at a later time y.

You're not the only one that got confused by this, so I'll update the tutorial and rules section to make that more clear. Thanks for checking very closely!

(+1)

I love this game. I did all the puzzles, and now I'm gonna do the hard ones again. I can't wait to see where this goes

(1 edit) (+1)

Oh wow thank you for your wonderfully positive comment!! The daily puzzles might be exactly for you then :D Good that you've followed - you'll get a notification when this feature drops!

(+2)

Doesn't seem to be working well for me. For some reason it breaks often on the "select time and place", the confirmation that I'm sure just doesn't show up, no matter how much I click, and from that point the "not sure" button stops functioning too.

(+1)

Hello Rawrkitteh, thank you for taking the time to play my game and report the bug. It is hard to reproduce but I've just pushed a fix that seems to have resolved it. In case it happens again or you notice some different issue don't hesitate to leave a comment. Have a great day!

(+1)

Some brain-melting gameplay, and a hint of critique ;)

(+2)

Thank you so much for posting the very first video review! It great that you went in-depth and I've left my thougths underneath your video. Keep up the great work <3

(+1)

Fun concept and art style!

If you don’t mind feedback, I had some UI complaints: the textbox text constantly changing size/wrapping was very distracting, and when I was dragging a chess piece, I expected to drop it so its base would land on the target square, but I guess my finger had to land on the target square instead. On mobile, I didn’t love having to zoom in and out of the different times - it would be nice to always have one board centered, but with a timeline that lets me switch or scrub between which time period shows.

Keep it up, this is fun flavor and an interesting game!

(+1)

Hey Celia, thank you very much for your detailed feedback! In fact my next update will be a collection of small UI improvements. So feel free to follow the project since there is more stuff coming :D

(+1)

Interesting concept and good game, I like it.

Thank you very much! Also great that you've followed since there are more updates coming :D

(+1)

Wonderful idea, also fun to play. The puzzles are engaging and the visuals are really cute, especially the scribble versions. Some levels are too easy and most of the time it's rather obvious who took the king out. Hope to see more complexity in the future levels.

Nevertheless, I really did have a great time playing it! :))

Thank you, glad to hear that you like the idea :D

As a matter of fact, I just released a new puzzle concept that should make the puzzles significantly harder, check it out! https://varzival.itch.io/chessboard/devlog/1506360/new-poison-puzzles

So you see, it's worth it to follow me and the project updates, lots of good stuff coming in the future!

(+1)

I’m always hyped for more fresh puzzle games, and this one has a cool premise, unique art and I’ve never played anything like it!! I’m very interested to see where it’ll go! Also very nice to meet you today, Vadim, wish you all the best with this :)

Thank you so much for taking the time to play and comment! I have a few more ideas cooking so keep an eye out for updates ;-)

All the best wishes for Tiny Bookshop and your other future endeavours!

And huge congrats for winning the price for best debut game!! I'm so happy for you :)

(+2)

I love this game, but its too easy imo. The game is really well made though so no complaints on that end.

Hope you continue working on this or at least make more games :D

(+1)

Great to hear that you love the game!! Thank you so much for the encouragement.

My journey with Murder on the Chessboard is not over yet, stay tuned for harder challenges!

(+1)

very cute! it was very fun and i loved the graphics, i could figure out most of the puzzles without filling most of them in bc there was only one spot where the muder could happen (usually the panel before the last one) and then you can just figure out which character could have been there by backtracking from the last panel, but that's part of the fun i guess


imo it could use more of a difficulty spike since they felt a bit easy, but it's lovely for what it is as well!

(1 edit)

Thank you so much for playing my litte prototype <3 
Yes, higher difficulty puzzles are definitely on my list, some ideas:

- you also need to give alibis for the other pieces

- you don't know the last position and have to track from the front without knowing the king's final spot

- King is poisoned instead of knifed and moves after the murderer has struck

Stay tuned for more :D