Android Chess

Android implementation of chess, repurposed from a terminal version of chess. Features all chess functions including checks, checkmates, drawing, castling, pawn promotion, and en passant. Additionally, it includes the option to record games and play then back move by move.

• Minimum SDK: 21
• Target SDK: 23

Technology

This application was built completely with Java 8 in Android Studio. Data storage for recordings was implemented using java.io.Serializable and stored locally.

UML

The initial UML we implemented for the base chess game.

1d array Board implementation

At the time of doing this project, my partner and I both hated doing any sort of 2d array calculation and movement, so we decided to see if we could implement a Board class with only a one dimensional array with 64 Pieces.

By doing this, we were able to map position (e.g: a2, e6) and movement to integer values 0 - 63 rather than to 2d array values. For some cases, this eased up methods, such as determining whether or not a piece was on the left or right border:

//Piece.java
public static boolean isLeftBorder(int space){
        switch(space){
            case 56:
            case 48:
            case 40:
            case 32:
            case 24:
            case 16:
            case 8:
            case 0:
                return true;
            default:
                return false;
        }
    }

Another benefit was that at the time this made movement more intuitive for us. Moving vertically was increasing or decreasing the index position of a piece by 8, while horizontally was generally by 1 or -1. In this manner, moving a pawn diagonally was simply moving by 7, 9, -7, or -9.

Serialization

Using java.io.Serializable, we store Recording instances, which are objects that contain a name, date of recording, and a list of moves (as strings) made and recorded during a game.

Playback

Playback and game recording are extensions of logic used for the base game. By setting a click listener to read each line of a list of moves,