Prismarch: A Chess Roguelike

[digital rivet]

Hi everyone, I just recently released the demo 1.0 version for my upcoming chess roguelike Prismarch after about 10 months of development

Made with Unity 6 HDRP!

Chess, but your pieces can gain abilities like Overshield, Undying, Solarbeam, etc. When you capture enemy pieces you gain exp and choose randomized level rewards of various rarities and uses.

If that sounds fun to you it would mean a lot to me if you checked it out!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4367400/Prismarch_Demo/

I'll be posting a detailed development overview here shortly: 👇

Steam

Prismarch Demo

Prismarch: A Chess Roguelike Demo marries the strategy of chess with the action and freedom of video games. Your pieces gain abilities that amplify their potential. You'll need it! Face off against waves of pieces from elemental kings in this action packed reimagination of the time weathered classic.…

The project started in April 2025, I got the idea to make a chess game but your pieces have modular abilities and can do stuff like explode, warp around, etc.

The prototype name for the game was 'onslaught chess' and I knew I wanted a kind of wave-based system where it's not just a generic standard chess board layout.
I vaguely knew I wanted to do some type of roguelike shenanigans so I made the decision very early on to make an 8x16 board. The issue is we will need space.
If later in the game the enemy has a roster of three or four rows of pieces, and the player has summoned or spawned extra pieces as well, there simply won't be any space
to play the game.

Regardless, I started by making a bunch of cubes with a for loop, labelling them, and importing some free chesspiece models to get to work.
I also made an EXP bar and did some preliminary stuff for levelling up and gaining rewards, and added a script to control the turns. Added move/tile indicators, etc.

From the get-go I believed that a big part of this is UI and UX. There is something inherently satisfying about moving chesspieces around even if you're terrible at the game.

So I wanted to lean into that. I want outlines for the pieces, and tooltips. I used this HDRP Custom Pass Volume for the outlines: https://github.com/alelievr/HDRP-Custom-Passes

I made a couple big mistakes during this time:

1. I programmed each chess piece's moveset / behavior from scratch. Why?? This has been solved a thousand times. It would have made life easier to use an existing solution.
2. Copied Balatro's card UI. Okay, sure, it's just a placeholder. But the big issue was that I reasoned most of the UI's can be made with overlapping windows so I programmed a whole convoluted UI system that generates UI windows and resizes them on the fly. Did it work? Yes. Was it also a nightmare to debug and created a gnarly hierarchy only viewable at runtime? Also yes. I thought I was smarter than Unity and that was not the case.

May 2025:

This was the start of putting in a lot of the meat & potatoes. Did a lot of brainstorming on the abilities and rewards, started coding them in. Having to mouse over every piece to see what abilities is has can't be the only way to tell so I knew each piece needed a visual component to make it easily distinguishable.

Started creating shaders & shadergraphs for the visuals, struggled to get the UI system to work.

I am not an artist by any stretch of the imagination, but I enjoyed doing the pixel arts for the abilities & rewards. I found it a lot easier since it's just a 100x100 or 24x24 icon, instead of trying to create the pixel art mona lisa like you see on social media sometimes.

Added in some camera controls, and got into the Steam partnership program & paid for an app license.

June 2025:

Looking back at some of this stuff really makes me cringe now. If you needed proof I didn't use AI, here it is. I started trying to get a capsule art, I read online a lot of people saying you need to have your steam page up for as long as possible so that you can slowly gather wishlists over time, but I wish I had ignored that.

I went live with my steam page with essentially what was still a prototype and didn't do myself any favors to any potential buyers. I had my sister try to work on a capsule art and took my own crack at it.

Finished up a lot of the rewards and added a barf inducing and nauseating background using procedural marbling.

July 2025:

I did a lot of work on the program flow, what happens when the king takes damage (there is no checkmate),
adding the scripts to go to the next wave, for the kings to die and for the next king to show up.

Sketched out a slightly better capsule art, worked on quite a few ability interactions & bugs, and
created the side UI and turn log.

I have no experience with 3D modelling but I can do basic stuff in blender and pushed myself to learn a little more as it became necessary.

Nothing terribly exciting here.

August 2025:

More VFX & Shader Graph work, started seriously working on the SFX and audio in the game.

I wanted some type of metaprogression where you spend crown shards to boost your piece types and start the game with more abilities, so I blocked out the upgrades scene and laid the foundation for that.

I worked on the other kings and added a collection/abilities log.

Spent way too much time trying to make this ice cone VFX work, yeah, you professional VFX artists have my respect.

The quest for a half decent capsule art continues! In this episode of the saga I get scammed by a fiverr artist (last pic) who
swore up and down they wouldn't use AI. This guy even pasted the art into photoshop and made a bunch of empty layers
to try to make it seem like it was handmade. Well, they got banned off the platform and I got a refund, but still,
no dice on a capsule art.

I don't have the budget to pay $350-500 for a capsule art, though I know those talented artists are worth it. Maybe next game!

September 2025:

At this point I finished up some new reward implementations, and the core of the game was mostly done.

I made a few posts on reddit and it became abundantly clear that the game had a visual issue.
I tried a few things like adding foliage to the tiles, and toying around with some ideas,
adding some border to the chessboard, but nothing was really solving it.

For starters, I had copied a lot of UI from Balatro and while yes it's just placeholders, I was procrastinating replacing
them so the game just looked like a cheap copy.

I was really unhappy with this and started to become really disillusioned with the project.
I want my games to be unique and yes, I pull inspiration from all the different games that I love,
it should not be so blatant.

The game should stand on its own merits. As you can see I started working on other projects at this time
like my RPG and an archer idle game. Just dodging the problem really.

October 2025:

This was definitely the lowest point of my mental and for the future of the project. I just couldn't think
of how to fix things at all. It's all wrong and shit, but how do I fix it?

I barely worked on the game at all this month and I was heavily considering dropping the project.

November 2025:

One day I just decided, okay let's just try a super basic terrain and see what happens. I need an actual environment for
these levels, and boom!

Yeah, it's ugly as hell. Adjust the coloring a little bit.. and yeah! We're not cooking with gas yet but it's a start!

This broke my block because at least I knew I was heading in the right direction.

Then, another day and randomly in the shower the entire idea for a hub world popped into my head and I rushed downstairs
to implement it.

Be nice if this Prismarch game actually has a prism in it, no?

I took the dialogue system from another project and added in a bishop NPC and some quests.

Made a main menu. Feeling a little bit better.

December 2025:

Not much this month because of Christmas.

Now, my original idea of having the player fight through all 7 kings in a row seems way too difficult (without upgrades)

so the addition of the portals helps a lot. I can just do a skirmish mode of 1 king, and unlock endurance mode after
the player beats all 7.

I did finally get a capsule art that I like. It's not perfect, but it was in my budget and way better than anything I could make. Slowly getting there.

January 2026:

Another 'lock in' month. I initially intended to join February next fest, but decided to postpone to July so I can have time to do some marketing, but I still wanted to get the demo done like I had set the deadline.

So, I needed the first two kings to be playable & mostly bug free and the visuals still needed a lot of tweaking.

I did some more blender work to shrink the board, and added a table.
I went back to the upgrades scene and fleshed it out and got it working & actually awarding upgrades.

I reworked all the UI's in the game and did it the proper way. I got rid of my stupid runtime UI generator.

Now the tooltips are faster, they look more unique, and most importantly it's prefab based so I can tween them
when the player mouses over a piece. Everything's looking a lot cleaner.

February 2026:

The astute of you would notice that this is now!

Well, there's 10 months of development. Does the game look perfect? No.

I think I still have some visual issues and cohesion problems between the different UI's in the game.

Some areas of the game have had more love than others, but I'm not done!

I still need to program a few king's abilities by July, and there's a ton of stuff I'd like to add like

head to head (PvP), possibly a normal chess board mode with abilities, relics, quests, secrets, and more.

And of course more abilities and rewards!

Feel free to ask any questions if you like, it's been fun and challenging.

Retrospectively, I think it was a good idea to work on the meat & potatoes first (The code of the abilities and how the game operates and functions) - I think at the end of the day I wanted to create a game that has potential of 100s of hours to sink into it and I at least achieved creating the bedrock for that.

I do think it sucks for gameplay based games because everything is judged so hard on visuals. The game might be great and people will just not even give it a second look if it's not perfect. And I am a programmer first and foremost. Art does not come naturally to me. In fact, I'm very proud that I've created the game in its current state even though I used tons of free & paid assets (mostly 3D models, VFX, and SFX), I broke out of my comfort zone and created a lot of things, too, and that was rewarding.

That's all for now!

[digital rivet]

Shop WIP - this shit looks like such ass 😭 but the game is missing something. It needs more juice and number go up!