Last Updated: 5 Aug 2024

3D Chess

A highly engaging 3D Chess Multiplayer Game developed in Unity, offering various levels of difficulty. Players can challenge their strategic thinking in a realistic 3D environment, with a multiplayer feature allowing users to compete with friends or random opponents.

Challenges

Developing a seamless and engaging chess game came with several technical challenges that needed to be addressed to ensure a smooth gameplay experience. From optimizing real-time synchronization between multiple players to designing an AI that adapts to different difficulty levels, each aspect required careful planning and execution. Additionally, rendering a visually appealing 3D chessboard while maintaining performance across various devices, along with handling real-time multiplayer communication without lag, was crucial in delivering an immersive and responsive gaming experience.

During the game, ensuring smooth synchronization of moves between multiple players was a challenge.
Designing the AI to behave differently based on the selected difficulty level was a time-consuming task.
Achieving smooth, lag-free rendering of a 3D chessboard with realistic piece movements was difficult, especially on lower-end devices.
Ensuring that moves, player actions, and game state changes were transmitted correctly without delay posed a challenge.

Solutions

Creating a chess game that provides smooth and real-time multiplayer gameplay while maintaining high performance presented several unique challenges. The game needed to handle the synchronization of moves across devices, adapt the AI for different difficulty levels, and render the 3D chessboard smoothly on a variety of devices. Additionally, real-time communication between players had to be flawless to avoid delays or desyncs during the game. These challenges required carefully implemented solutions to ensure a seamless experience for users.

To address the real-time multiplayer synchronization, I implemented Photon Networking, which ensured that each player’s moves were accurately updated across all devices without lag or delay. This allowed for a smooth and responsive multiplayer experience. For AI behavior, I utilized Unity’s ML-Agents to train the AI and adjusted the algorithms to create difficulty tiers that provided a balanced challenge for players, ranging from basic to advanced strategies.

To optimize the 3D chessboard rendering, I focused on reducing the rendering load using Unity’s Occlusion Culling and Level of Detail (LOD) features, ensuring that performance was maintained, even on lower-end devices. Additionally, I optimized network communication by using efficient data serialization techniques and minimizing latency through predictive movement and interpolation, ensuring that player actions and game state changes were transmitted smoothly without noticeable delays. These solutions worked together to create an immersive and responsive chess game.