Add option for custom background, Large Board, Candy Land

[awolfe9]

Seems like we should be able to have squares be transparent, and have a background image for the whole screen. This, paired with some neat custom variants and pieces, could be included with the app to provide examples of how users could possibly use our app to replicate weird board games or just more general games. Because I realized that it doesn't seem too difficult. Similarly, if we want to try to make a Large Board, we could maybe add implementation for huge grids (either in the hundreds or a thousand). If we get all this, which doesn't seem too bad, right, could we maybe make Candy Land with this thing? That could be cool, right?

[drewhannay]

I believe John is working on making the background look nicer right now, but I don't know about letting it be a custom background. There seemed to be some issues with setting an image as the background of a JFrame (although it's possible we could work around that).

It seems like "Large Board" shouldn't necessarily be a separate option...you should just be able to specify the dimensions and we should scale up gracefully. I think both of those would be good options though.

Implementing Candy Land would also require the ability to specify a deck of cards to go with the game, the ability to draw a random card, and the ability to specify generic rules for what each card does (which seems rather difficult). It sounds like a cool thing to do eventually, but it might be nice to get actually chess working solidly first. :)

[awolfe9]

Agreed x3. The Candy Land thing was kind of a dream big eventuality thing. But with what we almost have now, we could have different stationary Pieces be special squares on the board, and capturing them triggers an event or something. Just spitballing. We'll stick to chess for now.

[jmccormi]

I am working on some generic background for the entire app as well as a refresh of the images for the pieces. I think we might want to re-define what kind of scope we are looking for with this app as the "base" release of it before adding more stuff on :)

[awolfe9]

True dat. We'll stick to chess for now, but we should definitely consider adding dice or cards or something at some point.

[jmccormi]

We should also allow the squares to re-size as the window grows or shrinks up to a certain amount. The images that are now included for the pieces are 150 x 150 to allow for this.