Question

I’m starting to make a checkers game and I’ve got all my graphics plus the board drawn.
Before I moved on to creating the pieces I was wondering what an easy way to tackle the logic side of the movement of pieces.. Should I make a table of every square, detecting if it has a piece and if so, what color? (i.e 0=empty, 1=red, 2=black) or do you guys have a better idea to this issue?

Answer 1

By using OOP principles I would go with something like:

enum Side {
  BLACK,
  RED;
}

class Position {
  int x, int y;
}

class Piece
{
  Position position; // position inside the board
  Side side; // which side the piece is
}

class Board
{
  Piece[][] board = new Piece[8][8];

  boolean isMoveLegal(Piece p, Position newPosition) {
    ...
  }

  void doMove(Piece p, Position newPosition) {
    if (isMoveLegal(p, newPosition) {
      // game logic of movement and eating other pieces if needed
    }
  }
}

A more naive approach could use a simple map:

class Position {
  int x, int y;
}

class Piece
{
  Side side; // which side the piece is
}

class Board
{
  HashMap<Piece, Position> board;

  boolean isMoveLegal(Piece p, Position newPosition) {
    ...
  }

  void doMove(Piece p, Position newPosition) {
    if (isMoveLegal(p, newPosition) {
      // game logic of movement and eating other pieces if needed
    }
  }
}

That can be use to avoid storing the current position of a piece inside itself.