Joseph's most recent contribution to the website. Play against a fully functional checkers AI on easy or medium difficulty in this challenging port of a classic board game. Jumps are required, of course.

Much like regular checkers, players take turns moving pieces across the board by selecting a piece and clicking on the desired tile. When a player can jump, they must jump. Pieces can also become kings when they reach the opposite end of the board.

Checkers was developed as a year-long project during the 2015-2016 school year as an experiment with AI. The AI took months to create, as it required not only a general knowledge of the rules, but also a sense of the board, a way of knowing every possible move, and a way of effectively eliminating poor move choices. The bot is designed to think a certain number of turns ahead (3 for easy mode and 5 for medium) and find every possible move, including jumps. The computer decides which move is best by eliminating bad moves through a few algorithms (the actual factors for determining a "good move" are kept secret), and then does it. This process is generally effective, but can get messed up when facing another computer player. Also, do to relatively little optimization, the process can take exponentially long amounts of time when thinking too many turns ahead (this is why hard mode is disabled).
Not much else is known about the development process, but the game was released in the spring of 2016 and seemed unbeatable. The game was hailed for its ambitious concept, clean sound direction, and gameplay.

• Checkers features two relaxing tracks that cycle while playing, titled 'Puzzle Game 2' and 'Puzzle Game 3' by Eric Matyas.
• Checkers was the first of Joseph's games to feature cleaner code, utilizing more helper functions and better variable and function names as a major part of the process.
• The game is one of the simplest projects (file-wise) on the website, using very few sprites, audio clips, and scripts.

Date

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Date

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Creator: Joseph Lerner

Format: Unity Web Player

Dimensions: 1140x700

Completion: Full Game