Agario Checkers
===============

Checkers-like game with inspiration from agar.io

Concept
-------

The game begins as normal checkers, each player possessing 12 pieces on the
dark squares of the board. The player with the purple pieces will make the
first move. All pieces begin with a mass of 10.

Pieces of the same player may merge to combine their mass. If opposing pieces
collide, the one of smaller mass is absorbed; otherwise, they block each other
from moving. The game software prevents a player from feeding the opponent.

Pieces who reach the opposite side of the board gain no mass, but they gain the
ability to move backwards on the board. A symbol will represent this ability on
the piece.

Any piece may divide into two equal pieces if sufficient space exists. Half of
the split piece is ejected 2 spaces in the indicated direction, and it may
absorb opposing pieces in the process. If a larger opponent piece is in the
line of fire, the game software prevents accidental suicide of a piece. If a
king splits, the ejected piece does not keep king status. This is considered a
sacrifice so that players may not quickly split and merge with all their pieces
to obtain a full board of kings.

The first player to have all of their pieces absorbed loses. If only two pieces
remain, the player with the piece of larger mass wins.

Controls
--------

Select a piece to move with the left mouse button. Purple player moves first.

An arrow will point to spaces you can try to move to. Left click to move, or
right click to cancel your piece selection.

Hold space before moving to perform a split (as described above in the
concept).

Running
-------

Agario Checkers uses the LÖVE 2D game engine. It must be installed to run the
game. On Debian-based operating systems, this can be done with

    # apt-get install love

With LÖVE installed, you can start the game in two ways. The first is to use
the current working directory:

    $ love .

The other is to run a packaged version of the game. See below for details.

**NOTICE:** Agario Checkers was tested against version 0.9.2 of LÖVE. It will
  not run on versions lower than 0.9.0. Future versions are untested.

Packaging
---------

One of the conveniences of LÖVE is its simple packaging system. A runnable
`love` file is simply a zip archive with the Lua sources inside it. A makefile
has been provided with this program to ease the packaging process. Simply
execute

    $ make

to zip up the sources and data files into a package. The resulting file will be
called `agario-checkers.love`, and it can be tested by running

    $ love agario-checkers.love

This package can then be sent to other computers as a standalone game file. Any
computer with the LÖVE engine installed can run the package, which makes this
game cross-platform as well.

Hacking
-------

Follow the conventions you see used throughout the source code. 3-space
indentation and 79-column limit with few exceptions. You may submit patches
through GitHub's pull request system or by [submitting them to Delwink][1].

License
-------

See license headers in source files for details.

The images used in Agario Checkers (except the DELWINK trademark, see below for
details) are libre culture: you are free to use, copy, modify, and redistribute
them under the terms of version 4.0 of the Creative Commons Attribution
International License. See [COPYING.CC-BY](COPYING.CC-BY) for details.

"DELWINK" is a trademark of Delwink, LLC, subject to the terms of its
[trademark agreement][2]. **If and ONLY if** that page is not available, a copy
of the trademark agreement is contained in the [TRADEMARKS](TRADEMARKS) file.

[1]: mailto:contribute@delwink.com
[2]: http://delwink.com/trademarks.html