Ethereal Legends

I hang out lurking on the gamedev subreddit. Saw a post today from an aspiring gave developer looking to work for a AAA gaming company. He is an older gent. Works in the IT industry. Been trying to get a game dev job for six years. No luck yet.

The exceptional thing about this guy is that he created his own company and developed a game. Tried to do that to beef up his resume. The game is a 3D world made with the help of Unity. It is called Ethereal Legends. Check out a review of the game on YouTube.

You know it is a tough transfer from IT to gaming if this guy cannot make the jump. He has already shipped a title on Steam. I guess you got to go straight into game dev right from college. Hope you got good grades, some internships, and a bunch of side projects to impress the gaming companies.

Checkers Jump and Capture

I am back to working on my checkers program. Added the capability for the player to jump over and capture the computer pieces. The computer cannot jump over the player pieces yet. And there is no double jump. But all of those are coming soon.


Eventually I will need the ability to promote pieces to kings for both sides. However right now I am focusing on baby steps. It is working out pretty good. Just doing some game logic. Not learning a whole lot of C++. But hey. Any programming is good practice.

Moving to the Checkers App

Originally I started writing a chess app to practice some C++ programming. The movement of the pieces were tricky. So I decided to work on the simpler checkers game. Having drawn the board, I am now drawing game pieces on the board.


I can respond to the player choosing a piece. The selected piece gets highlighted on the screen. Also can have the player click on the location where the piece should be moved to. Implementing simple checkers movement rules (no jumping opponent pieces yet).


Now that the player can move, time for the computer to do the same. Originally I thought I would generate a list of all possible moves and rank them. But for now I just have the computer choose the first available move.


These limitations lead to a pretty boring checkers game. I guess it is time to implement jumping/capturing opponent pieces. After that, I must implement piece promotion to kings. One thing at a time though.

Getting Ready For Chess

I decided that I wanted to try my hand at writing a chess game. Started thinking about the objects. The pieces were a bit complicated. So I simplified my aim and decided to go for checkers instead. I wrote some classes. Got some logic in there. Represented a game board with pieces on them.

At first I just used text to output the game board. It looked terrible. Plus it was clunky to specify the move you wanted to make. I did this to spend as little time on the user interface, leaving more time for the actual checkers engine. Never got to it.

Later I took a Udemy class that helped a lot. It was Learn to program Tic Tac Toe Game in Visual C++ on Windows. Whew. Lengthy course name. This was an awesome course. It got into the details of drawing the game board and playing the game. Just what I needed. Best of all, the course is free. Props to course instructor Mohammad!

With this knowledge, I launched my Visual Studio. Decided on a Win32 project. Much of the boilerplate was provided by the template for this project. I first customized the About box because it was easy. Then I filled in the WM_PAINT handler. It was actually quite easy. Now I have a game board drawn.

Next step: draw some checkers pieces.