Started a few days ago with the idea of mixing my two favorite games and ChessBall was born.
The basic game was made really fast but it takes time to make a balanced ruleset.
And I thought it is easy to make an ai. Only the alpha beta search (like for every two player game) and a nice heuristic and then the ai will work.
But because of the other ruleset of the game and the huge possibilities to move and pass it is a real challenge. In normal chess you have in one turn between 30 and 150 opportunities to make a move. In ChessBall you have between 83 and 650000 opportunities because you can move a figure and pass/shoot the ball up to three times in one turn.
So at the moment the ai needs sometimes really long to move (between 5 seconds and 5 minutes). But I try to "pimp" the ai.
And now if you see, hey it is easy to make an ai, then try it out. In the demo you can load your own ai written in Java. At the website for the game you can find a tutorial. At the moment it is in german, but I will translate it in english soon.
