wp7dev: Chess Club demo

Live chess on the WP7 phone. This four-minute demo walks through some of the important bits of what the Chess Club app can do. (As an added bonus, I also show off how practicing mate-with-bishop-and-knight has worked out.)

Chess Club works with both ICC and FICS.

Sorry for the bad video quality; it's hard to read that stupid text. Grrrr...

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• chess
• wp7
• apps

[64nkvd]

Congrats for the good work! I really like the UI and the whole design. Still have a note: I think in portrait mode the board should be at the bottom and info screen at the top. Otherwise the handling would be a bit awkward on a real device. I'm not sure if there is an adjustment for that.

[klerulo]

@64nkvd An interesting point. I placed the message area and move list at the bottom so that you could manipulate them without obscuring the board; if you had to reach to the top to scroll the move list, for example, your hand would continuously be on top of the board.

Are you concerned that the left thumb will have a tendency to slip over the display and mess with the upper left of the board?

[sahatnow]

@0m3n1337: It looks like a Silverlight application.

[klerulo]

@sahatnow Woot! Since it's actually an XNA app and has zero silverlight at all, I'm glad to hear you say that: I tried pretty hard to make it behave like the rest of the phone.

[0m3n1337]

If I were you I would try to add more space for the board itself, other than that it looks great. Did you make it in silverlight or XNA?

[klerulo]

@0m3n1337 The board is 480x480 pixels: no borders, no lines between squares. It's as big as I can make it and still have a square board that fits all on the screen at once. I've done many chess apps before and absolutely agree that a big board is a good thing.

The app is XNA based: no silverlight at all.

[64nkvd]

@klerulo I am not sure what functionality is under the text field, however this is a chess game and my assumptions are that the most operations would be done on the board, not on the text. I think the more convenient zone of the screen in a real device is the bottom half, especially if there is a large screen (imagine HD2 like device with WP7). That’s why in my opinion it will be better if the board is at the bottom.

[mdtauk]

@klerulo Well you could provide a popup screen which overlays with options linked to what you press. And you could have a mixture of square tiles for actions like the live tiles, but perhaps just an outline instead of full colour square - and text links for settings.

Rather than mixing actions and settings on one screen.  You should create a path for a user to follow before starting a game. Transitions from one screen to another would help.

[klerulo]

Thanks for the feedback. The object/action distinction has been bothering me too--not just here, but in the WP7 device in general: the Microsoft-provided Settings application (which is pretty much the only other thing on the emulator) has the same paradigm problem.

I'll see if I can find a visual way to distinguish them.

[mdtauk]

The UI is quite complex and dense, you may want to separate options from actions. So you click start game, and a popup appears where you choose your options. Once you choose an option it is ticked or is coloured, with all ticked the OK button is active and you press it to start the game.