How the Chessboard works

Board / Board Color System – Scalable Theme Setup

This document explains how the current board/tiles system is structured, and how to extend it in a scalable way so you can sell / unlock additional board colors (themes) via a store.

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1. Overview

The system is built around three main pieces:

1. aBoard (controller object)

   • Responsible for creating all the tile instances once.
   • Stores basic configuration like tile size, scaling, and origin.
   • Uses global.initializeBoard as a flag to decide when to build the board.

2. BoardPiece (tile object)

   • Represents a single board square (tile).
   • Many instances of this object exist, one per square (e.g. 8×8 = 64 tiles).
   • Each instance stores:
     • is_light → whether the tile is a light or dark square.
     • sprite_index → which sprite to display, based on the selected theme.
     • exported variable:
       • 1. pos → chess coordinate like "e4".
       • 2. contain → for future implementation.

3. boardColorMap (In ./Scripts)
   • Given is_light (true/false) and using global.boardColor, returns the correct sprite.
   • Acts as the single place where theme → sprites is defined.
   • This is where you plug in new themes.
   • Also need to add it to global.AllboardColors in DefaultSettings object.

See how to add a new theme here: How to add a new theme

(This separation lets the board be created once, and then “repainted” by changing the sprites, without recreating instances.)