Determine/Design UX patterns for moving game pieces

[ghost]

We'll need to decide how we want the UX to work for a user when they want to move a game piece. Some questions to consider:

• How will we show that a piece is selected? Does it appear to lift from the board? Is it highlighted?

• Will the user be able to drag-and-drop the game piece? Or will the user only be allowed to select a game piece by clicking on it and then clicking on the space that will be the destination for the piece?

• Do the game pieces animate from space-to-space?

• How will we allow for a double jump?

• How will we disallow invalid moves? Will we alert the user to an invalid drop/selection space, or will we simply make it inaccessible to the pointer?

[ghost]

@sxkosone if you do some checkers game research, and you come up with any other questions we should answer about the game piece UX, please add them in the comments here.

[sxkosone]

Excellent questions. Here are my initial opinions

• How will we show that a piece is selected? Does it appear to lift from the board? Is it highlighted?
Pieces should appear to lift from board. Could a simple CSS styling, such as drop shadow, achieve this?

• Will the user be able to drag-and-drop the game piece? Or will the user only be allowed to select a game piece by clicking on it and then clicking on the space that will be the destination for the piece?
I personally prefer one click to select piece, second click to select destination, especially on touch screens

• Do the game pieces animate from space-to-space?
Some animated path, either simple slide or curved slide (to mimic the piece rising) would be neat

• How will we allow for a double jump?

• How will we disallow invalid moves? Will we alert the user to an invalid drop/selection space, or will we simply make it inaccessible to the pointer?
I prefer a short "that's an invalid move" alert message. But I do not have a strong opinion on this