We're getting closer to releasing this game. Alpha build is out and being tested.
If you're interested in helping out, jump to my discord: https://discord.gg/HYV8Zz8V2Q.
CORB coming in a week
In exactly week from now 26th of February, Chess Opening Repertoire Builder is coming out. Wishlist it!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2755460/
What's happening with Master of Chess?
The game is progressing with a nice and steady pace. There's improvements all around, but the biggest ones are around:
- Tournaments - this is a big part of the game loop, your player character playing many tournaments and progressing through the ranks so it makes sense I've finally took some time to give it justice. The UI of it is completely changed, the tournaments are generated with more idea behind them, and there's other types of tournaments now except the Swiss one. I've probably forgot some things but you get the gist.
- Openings - Did I tell you about CORB? Well, that's a small app I extracted from MoC and it helped pinpoint some issues Openings feature have in Master of Chess. There's plenty of improvements I did there and plenty more to come
- Avatars - Ever looked at the NPC avatars in the game and thought wow do those look weird? Well, it's because they were placeholders for the real deal. There's plenty of work around it in the background to make them consistent and awesome.
- Puzzles - Having just a couple puzzles to test your knowledge out is a thing of the past. Thousands of new puzzles have been added, but also some logic to track you puzzle rating and to pick appropriate puzzle difficulty over time
- UX niceties - or more commonly known as QOL improvements. I improved the match review screen in many ways and squashed couple of bugs. Also, a feature that was requested many times: picking what to promote to, has been added.
Now these are just things that pop into my mind right now, there's probably tens of other things I added or fixed in the meantime.
What's next?
I'll spend the next week mostly focused on getting CORB to be clean and useful for users. It's going to be my first release on Steam so I want to do it justice. Then, the idea is to focus on Openings feature more, and to integrate it completely into gameplay. After that, I think the game will be ready for closed beta and we can take it from there.
Bye bye!