Chessy

This chess game was written by Violet McClure for final project.

There is no chess engine; this was quite enough work as it is.

It provides move validation and a nice UI.

There are three ways to move a piece:

1. click and drag a piece
2. click a square; then click a destination square
3. use hjkl or arrow keys to move a cursor; use space to select a square
   and a destination square

If you don't use the arrow keys (or hjkl) and space, the cursor will disappear when you move a piece.

There are numbers from 8 to 1 for the ranks and alphabetic characters from 'A' to 'H' for the files.

If you make an invalid move, then an error message appears at the top of the screen.

In order to implement this chess game, chessprogramming.org was heavily used.

The move validation was implemented from memory, as I have played chess in my free time since middle school and have learned from various source and from playing on chess.com and lichess.

Running

If you have not already, set up a virtual environment (venv): python3 -m venv env

Each time you open a new shell, you need to start the venv: source env/bin/activate (in bash or zsh)

For Windows, you may need to use .\env\bin\activate.

Before you run Chessy for the first time, do pip install ..

The above command should install everything; if you get an error installing pygame, run pip install pygame==2.0.0.dev6 first and then pip install .

Now, each time you want to run Chessy, just activate the virtual environment and run chessy in the shell.

Todo

Unfortunately, I didn't get time to make a chess engine. First, I need to refactor how I do move validation and properly use bitboards. Then, I would be able to experiment with minimax and other algorithms in conjunctin with pseudo-valid move generation among other things that are commonly well known.