Need help with a chess-like game

Unity Engine
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Hi everyone, i’m new to Unity so i’m sorry if this is a stupid question.

I’m trying, as a little personal project, to create a similar game to chess. I followed this tutorial on Drag & Drop by quill18creates and i found it really helpful, but i’m now stuck as i don’t know how to proceed.

The tutorial basically creates some cards that you can drag and drop wherever you want on the screen, with a canvas acting as the playground and one acting as the player’s hand (pretty much like Heartstone).

The problem i’m facing is that my “playground” isn’t a simple space where all the cards are placed horizontally, but more like a chessboard or a matrix, with a set of spaces to place the cards and limited to a 4x4 or 5x5.
My question is: should i keep working on the UI side, creating new canvases and images as i did the cards, or should i create the chessboard in the scene while keeping the player’s hand as a UI element?
There really isn’t enough space to create the whole chessboard, so i thought of creating a top-down camera that the player can navigate, would that be a good idea? Could you link a manual or video that explains how to do this feature? Could there be any problem working both with UI elements and scene elements?

I hope i was able to explain what my problem is clearly, english is not my first language and i haven’t learned all the correct terminology of Unity, so i’m sorry if i wrote something hard to understand. I’m here to answer any question, and thank you for reading!

1 Like
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There isn’t really a right or wrong answer to this. It’s mainly based on the style you want for your game. If you play chess online, it usually looks like a simple 2D canvas. But some chess games display the board in 3D, with 3D pieces, and piece animations as they move. Neither approach changes the nature of the game, just the visual experience. So you should decide what’s right for your game.

From a practical standpoint, I’d probably stick with what you’ve got, and expand on it, rather than starting over from a new paradigm, until you’ve got a fair bit of your game implemented. Often new game developers (and old game developers as well) spend a lot of time on how things look before getting a good idea of whether the game idea itself is worth pursuing. So I wouldn’t worry much about what UI approach you take at this point. See if the game works, see if it’s fun, then polish it after.