Professor Alopex

Around this time last year, I got really into The Ouroboros King, and it made me want to try making a chess RPG of my own. So here's my idea for one: Caissa's Crusaders!

I haven't quite fleshed out the storyline, but I'm trying to brainstorm a bunch of variant pieces and make up movement patterns for each of them. I have a whole spreadsheet for it, as well as a mockup of the title screen. While I was brainstorming I mostly just scribbled random stuff on the piece base in GIMP to see if any cool shapes would make me think of a piece, and so far I've drawn about 130 of them.

I'm thinking the story would be about sentient chess pieces (who exist alongside humans) who do battle, and along the way, the player ends up going toe to toe with some sort of mysterious organization who uses 𝕰𝖛𝖎𝖑 𝕻𝖎𝖊𝖈𝖊𝖘 or whatever, and there'd be some sort of theme of deconstructing the fact that, when you're a sentient chess piece, your role in society is literally injection-molded into your body, but humans have no such restriction and are free to choose their destiny. Maybe some of your standard Yu-Gi-Oh! brand "if you lose the duel, you lose your soul!" type of stuff too. Also, checkers are the main currency of the game because they're also a game piece, but they look like coins. The boss battle pieces are currently Sisyphus, Midas, Icarus, Narcissus, Tantalus and Orpheus. I wanted to give them a "seven deadly sins" theme, with Sisyphus being wrath (in the legend, he was a cruel king who violated the custom of sacred hospitality), Midas being greed (obvious), and I'm not sure what the other sins would have been.

I'd love to hear you guys's thoughts on this, as well as some suggestions for other pieces to make or modifications to existing pieces. You can view the mockup of the title screen here and the list of pieces here.