A chess game built in Lua with the LÖVE game engine. Originally a learning project, it has grown into a clean, structured implementation of the full chess ruleset.
- Full chess rules — all piece movement with pins respected; no illegal moves possible
- Check detection — red king border and CHECK badge when in check, with an audio cue
- Checkmate & stalemate — detected automatically; a popup overlays the board without leaving the game screen
- En passant and castling (kingside and queenside), with correct rights tracking across moves
- Pawn promotion — piece-picker popup; the turn switch is deferred until a piece is chosen
- Resign — confirmation popup with a cancel option
- Draggable popups — all popups can be repositioned by dragging the title bar
- Move notation — latest move displayed above the board (e.g.
white_pawn to E4 e.p.) - Timers — game-elapsed and per-turn timers displayed in the UI
- Resizable window — board and UI scale continuously to the current window size
- Sound effects — piece moved, piece taken, in-check alert, button click
- OpenDyslexic font — used throughout for readability
| File | Responsibility |
|---|---|
main.lua |
LÖVE entry point; routes draw, mouse input, and screen transitions |
chess.lua |
Pure chess logic (no LÖVE dependency); all move generation and validation |
theme.lua |
Colour constants and font loading (Theme.load()) |
layout.lua |
Board and button geometry helpers; Layout.hit() for point-in-rect tests |
audio.lua |
Sound source registry and playback with random pitch variation |
ui.lua |
Draggable popup system (Popup.show / hide / draw / mousepressed / …) |
popups.lua |
Popup content factories (gameOver, resignConfirm, pawnPromotion) |
screens/menu.lua |
Main menu screen |
screens/game.lua |
Game screen — board rendering, input handling, game flow |
screens/options.lua |
Options screen (stub — currently a placeholder) |
spec/chess_spec.lua |
Unit tests, run with busted spec/ |
- LÖVE 11+ — love2d.org
- busted (optional, for tests) —
luarocks install busted
git clone https://github.com/yourusername/love2d-chess.git
cd love2d-chess
love .busted spec/| Action | Input |
|---|---|
| Select a piece | Left-click a piece belonging to the current player |
| Move | Left-click a highlighted destination square |
| Deselect | Left-click the selected piece again, or click elsewhere |
| Drag a popup | Click and drag the popup title bar |
- Populate the Options screen with real settings controls
- Load board positions from data files (FEN or a custom format) to configure puzzles and non-standard starting positions, rather than always beginning from the standard opening
- Format the game and turn timers as
mm:ssinstead of raw decimal seconds
- Record every move in a match as a structured list
- Display a scrollable move-history panel alongside the board
- Undo and redo moves during a game
- Step through the full move history after the game ends (previous move / next move)
- Define colour palettes and font choices as data, loaded from files
- Allow players to select a theme from the Options screen
- Store settings (selected theme, sound volume, etc.) as data — saved to and loaded from a file between sessions
- Lua — lightweight scripting language
- LÖVE — 2D game framework
MIT — see LICENSE.
- LÖVE — for the game engine
- Chess Icons — Cburnett, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Sound Effects — Kenney, CC0
- OpenDyslexic Font — Abbie Gonzalez, OFL