Thanks! Please let me know by sending me an email. Make sure to answer each of these questions, otherwise I won’t be able to fix it!
You can also click this debug button in the "Options" menu to include detailed logs in your email:
I've written a page describing the computer science of the ChessCraft AI.
Great! Send me an email, or mention it in the Discord chat channel for feature ideas. Then sign up for the Frame of Mind newsletter to stay up to date on ChessCraft updates and releases.
ChessCraft will probably always be a 2D, two player, turn based, perfect information, deterministic game. Features that violate that are less likely to be implemented. It's also important that the AI can play all designs reasonably well, so that rules out features with heavy impacts on combinatorics like:
Yes. See my blog under the ChessCraft category.
Please help improve ChessCraft translations by emailing me any corrections, or mention it in the Discord chat channel for translation corrections.
The low cost ChessCraft translation system uses a combination of Google Translate and community-led translation help.
I tried to reach as many people as possible by supporting many languages, but with no budget. Quantity over quality. Hopefully it’s good enough to be useful! It's also worth noting that you can choose your language in the options menu.
Maybe! Here's the big factors when I consider adding a language:
So you want to help? Thanks! If you want to add a new language or proofread an existing language, I may share a "translation spreadsheet" with you. Here's how that works:
{0}
or '{2}'
. ChessCraft inserts text into these places as you play the game. You can change the order of the tokens, but every language in one row must have the exact same tokens.\n
. ChessCraft replaces this with a newline, or "enter" character. You should try to use similar newlines in any translations. On a keyboard, the \
character is usually found next to your "enter" key.ods
spreadsheet file format. You can open this with typical office software, though I highly recommend the free and open source LibreOffice Calc.fr
in the "verified" column, it means that a human "may" have already proofread it ("fr" is French). If you don't, a human definitely has not seen it before. So a great place to start is looking at the rows where your language has never been proofread.My apologies if this seems like a lot, but I do not have the time to accept random help unless it's structured.
I want to show my appreciation for everyone who helps make ChessCraft better. If you help, just ask, and I can include your name or username in the credits! But what kind of help qualifies?
If you want to be an open beta tester on Google Play, you can join on the store page.
There is currently no beta testing on Steam, but that may change once I get more experience with Steam releases.
Maybe! Lots of people from the ChessCraft community have added their piece images to the game. See the #fan-art chat channel. However not all art makes it into the game. Here's some hard rules and soft guidelines:
512
by 512
pixels, PNG, with an alpha/transparent background. Both white and black. I can (but won't) fix your images.w-bishop.png
and b-bishop.png
.Does your idea not fit these rules? Share it anyway on #fan-art!
I recommend the free GIMP editor to make your images.
If your art is added to the game, send me your name or username and I'll add you to the game credits!
Finally, all art in the game is shared here under a Creative Commons license. For your art to be added to the game, you must agree to the same free and open license.
No. I would like to share the code but here are two concerns of mine:
ChessCraft started as a fun hobby project and I want to mostly keep it that way. I'm already doing more paperwork than I want keeping up with Google Play and Steam.
Yep! I've released the art for ChessCraft under a Creative Commons license. If you see art in ChessCraft that is not in that repository, let me know and I'll add it.
Nope! There is no official ChessCraft Patreon. Instead, when you support the ongoing development of ChessCraft by becoming a "patron", it's simply a badge of honor in game that turns off the interruptions.
I prefer not to talk about my future dreams for a project. What happens is I get enjoyment out of talking about what I "will" do, but without actually doing it. Then if I ever finish the work, I get less enjoyment because I already talked about it. In this way I'd be stealing enjoyment from my future self!
I do have a system to track all my bugs and features on GitLab. If you’d like, you can send an email and I’ll invite you to see all my GitLab issues.
Lots of people have asked for this! I understand that a lot of chess apps have this feature, and sometimes you genuinely make a mistake tapping the wrong move. This has happened to me too and it's always a bummer.
However, my intuition also tells me this spoils the game. The emotion and intensity you feel when you tap the wrong move swings the other way - you also feel great and accomplished when you lock in a great move. The reason you want an undo button is because you care about the state of the game. You care because it is real, locked in, and must be earned.
I'm not sure if I'll ever make an undo button. Maybe the button visibility could be optional and cannot be turned on during gameplay. I'm thinking about it. For now the answer is a soft no.
I'm interested in making a release for iPhone and Mac desktop. Unfortunately, I do not own an iPhone or Mac. I think these are my only options:
In addition to that, I will need to pay Apple 100 USD annually to be a developer, run through their long checklist of user interface requirements, and integrate their IAP rules into ChessCraft.
I'm also a big fan of FOSS and Linux, so I'm unlikely to jump through too many hoops or spend much money on Apple anytime soon.
Remember that ChessCraft started as a hobby project, not a business! My apologies if this is inconvenient. If I could push a magic button and release for iPhone and Mac, I would. Ironically, I have successfully created Mac builds for ChessCraft, I just cannot easily share them with you on any Apple platform.
Internally the game saves its boards in a format called ChessCraft Notation (CCN). You can see an example here, or if you click "CCN" on any board page. Each piece is assigned a letter of the alphabet, where white is uppercase, and there are 26 letters. There are many ways I might increase this maximum but it is low on my list of feature ideas. 26 is a lot!
It’s hard to say. I spent a lot of time just thinking about AI, reading AI code, and thinking about design before I started actually creating the game in January 2018.
If we don’t count that: the design, art, marketing, and programming up to version 1.10 has taken maybe 2000 hours.
No. I made this game because I wanted to play it! If making money was my top goal, I would have released a crippled demo, and I certainly wouldn't have promised to never have ads. In fact, if making money was my goal I don't think I would have started ChessCraft at all. The market for chess apps is hugely oversaturated.
Patronware is software that is free, complete, and ad-free. People feel good about donating money to the project. The project is not supported by dark patterns and harmful psychology.
ChessCraft tries to be patronware. I hope you agree. You can read more about this here.
This also gives me a good excuse to make bad business decisions, like avoiding the Apple App Store because of a combination of laziness and ideology.
The difficulty of a board is a combination of two factors:
So the hardest boards for a human to play are tiny boards, with weak, all custom pieces. As of version 1.3, the board and piece editors give you a preview of the estimated AI complexity and human complexity:
It varies a lot depending on the board size, pieces rules, and phone speed. I'm still considering how to measure and standardize the computer difficulties. Like many things with ChessCraft, this is a much harder problem than with a classic chess AI.
With a couple seconds of thinking on an average 2019 smartphone, the AI will correctly answer 24 of the 76 chess IQ puzzles on
However, I have a rating of 2000 on lichess puzzles and if I had an ELO it might be somewhere around 1400. If I play fast, my AI sometimes beats me. If I play a smaller board like a 6x6 I often lose.
There are still a lot of improvements I could make to the AI. Unfortunately, if I focussed completely on the AI, I wouldn't have a game, I would have an AI!
Frame of Mind is an AI games company in Montreal, Quebec.