In the previous post Remaking World 1-1 with Vulkan, mostly I’ve shown my progress with learning graphics programming. In the meantime, I finished another project pawn, a UCI protocol “compatible” GUI rendered with Vulkan API. Link to the source code: jan-kelemen/pawn.

The original idea that I had in mind when I started was to allow the player to play against the chess engine and for the board to be rendered in an isometric projection and 2.5D, kind of like IsoChess. This changed a bit along the way, I’ve kept the isometric view of the board, but the pieces and the board are full 3D models, it turns out it’s easier to find 3D models than the ones that would fit into the 2.5D style. The second difference is that the player doesn’t exist, the chess engine plays against itself, I’ll explain the reasons for this later.

A couple of months ago (2 to be exact), I started learning graphics programming with Vulkan API. I went through the Vulkan Tutorial, then made a Pong clone and a CHIP-8 emulator.

Sidenote, before this I’d never done any serious graphics programming at all, so use the information given here as a learning resource at your own risk.

After that, it was time to increase the complexity a bit, so I decided to remake the first level from Super Mario Bros, well, mostly. You can take a look at the gameplay footage of how far I’ve gotten in the video below.