Hey everyone,
I haven't posted here in a while — that doesn't mean development stopped. I keep reading every review and fixing things as quickly as I can. So I figured I'd do a catch-up post on everything that's changed. Please keep the feedback coming — I'll keep making the game better.
What's new
Export your games as PGN. Save any finished match as a .pgn. It's in Two places: a button on the post-game screen, and in your profile under Recent Games (where you can also export your last 5 games as one bundle).
Save your game as an image or animated GIF. Same post-game row got two siblings: a 1280×720 share-card image of the final position, and a GIF replay of the last 5 moves.
What got fixed
Study & Compete features that didn't work for everyone. Opening Explorer, Endgame Trainer, Guess the Move and Tournaments were all reachable but broken for some — empty boards, crashes, no progress. All four work end-to-end now. Tournament wizard also got a follow-up fix: the format you picked actually looks selected, and "Invite Friend" no longer crashes.
A puzzle that was already checkmate. One of the Perpetual Check puzzles in chapter 6 started with Black already mated, so it was literally unsolvable. Fixed, and I added a build-time check that scans every training puzzle (196 of them) for this kind of mistake — so this can't happen again.
A "fork" lesson that taught a losing fork. The Queen Fork lesson in chapter 2 had a position where the "correct" move just hung the queen. I replaced it with a real, sound fork.
"Opponent moves twice" feeling. On slow hardware the engine could accept your next move before the previous animation finished, so the next reply visually stacked on top. Now the engine waits for the animation to land.
Settings reverting to defaults / music too loud / Ctrl+- zooming you out and never coming back. Three bugs from a single very thorough report. All fixed:
- Settings (especially music mute) now stick across screen visits.
- The master volume slider now actually attenuates music in real time, including while dragging.
- Ctrl+- (and Ctrl+wheel) can no longer zoom you out into an unreadable UI. Existing damage from before this patch is also undone automatically next launch.
Dutch translation gaps on the Campaign card and a few lesson screens — all filled in.
Steam Deck launches faster and more reliably. A startup crash, two long freezes during launch, and a generally slow cold-load on Deck have all been tracked down and fixed. Windows launch is also about 3 seconds faster.
Translation quality across older lessons. An audit caught around 1,600 strings (especially in older lesson content) where translations had English sentence structure with foreign words substituted in — reading awkwardly. Re-translating those is its own focused pass, scheduled separately. In the meantime, the brand title is now consistent across all 24 languages and several broken Turkish strings are fixed.
A real thank-you
A lot of this update started with someone on this forum or in a review taking the time to write down what was wrong. In particular:
samantha_kers987 — your report covered four separate issues in one post and was unusually detailed. The zoom bug was the kind of thing that genuinely blocks someone from playing, and I wouldn't have caught it without you flagging exactly what you pressed. Thank you.
Umikaze — the broken Perpetual Check puzzle was a perfect bug report. You named the lesson, described the position, and explained why the prompt didn't match what was on the board. That made the fix straightforward, and it pushed me to build the validator that's now guarding the whole puzzle set.
To the player who flagged the Queen Fork lesson and the "opponent moves twice" feeling — sorry I don't have a name to put here. If you see this, thank you. Both were real and both are fixed.
To the player whose Steam Deck kept crashing — same. The fix took a while because the cause was three separate things stacked, but each one is now addressed.
To everyone who hit a save-data scare after the 1.0 update and reported it on the forum or in reviews — the recovery code now finds your old saves automatically. If you still don't see your progress, please post and I'll help directly.
If you've run into something that isn't in this list, please post about it. I read everything, and "small" reports often turn out to be the most useful ones.
If you are looking to support, please leave a review. Good, or bad it both really helps!
Thank you so much!