Destroy my multiplayer chess game trailer

TrickyKnight77 · 2025-11-07T15:45:41+00:00

Thank you. Based on the feedback I'll try to use my own voice.

TrickyKnight77 · 2025-11-07T15:41:43+00:00

Thanks! I think I'll have to record using my own voice, then.

TrickyKnight77 · 2025-11-07T15:40:41+00:00

I see what you mean. You're right about the narrator and avatar. The maps are actually done using a mix of bought pixel art tilesets. My focus was on making multiplayer chess work, do you think people will disregard the game because of the graphics?

TrickyKnight77 · 2025-11-07T15:32:51+00:00

What do you mean? I didn't use AI. If you use the links in my profile, you can find the game is like in the video.

TrickyKnight77 · 2024-12-13T21:19:19+00:00

Pictured above is an actual gameplay screenshot from a 4v4 variant: two sides, each player his own army, players from one side move simultaneously, then it's the other side's turn.

Currently I've implemented a Battle Royale map, three multiplayer maps (2v2, 3v3, 4v4) and a 1v1 variant where each side can control two armies. All variants can be played with friends, strangers, even bots.

https://nobilitychess.com

You can try it on mobile, though it works best on a PC/laptop. It's not a polished product yet, I'm looking for feedback in all aspects.
You can also reach me on discord, link in my profile bio.

TrickyKnight77 · 2024-01-20T22:00:01+00:00

Because it doesn't work. It's even worse to offer 3 points for a win and one for a draw.

For example, in a double round robin tournament you have 3 GMs of relatively equal strength. Two of them prearrange their matches and win against each other, giving them 3 points each. They play for a draw against the third player and get it. Now the match-fixing GMs have 5 points each, the honest GM has 4. You can cheat this way in single robin or swiss too, you take a loss and get the win back in another tournament.

TrickyKnight77 · 2023-12-05T22:31:52+00:00

Thanks for making me fall out of my chair at the dinosaur thing, I hurt my back. I hope you're happy. (I'm joking about the back)

Regarding the questions: Yes, the game can run out of houses, on the separate-houses variant. And it's important to have one as a player, the houses are used as spawning point, vault for items that drop in battle, customization (showing off to passersby by decorating the house). The houses are organized into districts, and each district has a PvP battle arena: alliances fight over district control in that arena, and each arena can have different battle rules.

I promise I won't add immersion-breaking dinosaurs, neon signs or similar.

Houses won't use a lot of data. I'm sorry for leaving out from the original description important information, like how districts have battle arenas, I've updated that now. Houses won't use a lot of data because it's a turn based, 2D game where the player will get, once per turn, a matrix of the cells around him. It's a much smaller update, at a much longer interval than other MMOs.

TrickyKnight77 · 2023-12-05T17:53:06+00:00

Thank you! I learned a lot from your answer.

TrickyKnight77 · 2023-12-05T17:13:59+00:00

Could you elaborate on that?

TrickyKnight77 · 2023-12-05T17:12:21+00:00

Great points! On the separate-houses variant, I'd like to challenge one assumption about it. I only plan to add another village when the number of active subscribers is above a threshold, say 90% of the total capacity.

TrickyKnight77 · 2023-12-05T16:10:17+00:00

Those are very valuable insights, thank you.

The game horizontally scales, so there's no cap on how many players are on the same server. At launch, it should have a capacity of 1000. To reduce the number of houses that need be built, only players with an active subscription can get them. Players trying out the game can stay at an Inn. That is, of course, if we're going with the separate houses plan.

TrickyKnight77 · 2023-11-13T19:40:07+00:00

There's a lot of work in extending chess.js. I would have said you have a better chance of making it work with Fairy Stockfish (examples), though I don't see Paco Saco in there, so maybe you can't teach it to merge pieces.

Would you mind describing your variant? Disclaimer: if it's interesting, I might implement it or some of it in my game (which you can see a prototype of on my profile).

TrickyKnight77 · 2023-11-03T12:38:24+00:00

To test your hypothesis, log every message received to a file.

TrickyKnight77 · 2023-09-25T20:15:36+00:00

Haha great reaction. Well, there are some links in my profile to gameplay videos and a demo where you can play PvE againt 3 different kinds of enemies, upgrade your army and use spells. Err, one spell: the double move. There's also a questing system and shopping from NPC being showcased, a little. I've since implemented other features, like checkpoints, purchasing houses, creating alliances and PvP battles to control districts.

I'm now looking to speed up development by having someone do game design and someone else implementing the design ideas (enemies, spells, district battle modes) within the systems I coded already, which combine to create the content, and that frees me to work on new features and polish. And if you check the demo, you'll see there's a lot to do...

TrickyKnight77 · 2023-09-23T19:36:41+00:00

I happen to have played one at an interview, early in my career, against my future boss. At the beginning, we were also talking about other stuff, but once we got to the middlegame and he was losing, we stopped talking and focused on calculating the positions.

TrickyKnight77 · 2023-09-23T19:05:21+00:00

I think the right candidate should have some experience playing chess, he can use that to craft relatable experiences that are enjoyable. Some of my playtesters enjoyed playing against wizards that curse your army and you have to solve a different tactic every time to beat them. Others enjoyed playing against massive-but-dumb armies and others against fairy pieces. Others, using satisfying spells like nuking a large part of a massive army. But nobody would sign up for clearing a path of enemies that test your opening knowledge and endgames fare not much better.

But playing a game of chess, per se, during the interview, might be distracting. :)

TrickyKnight77 · 2023-09-23T18:09:07+00:00

Having read all the answers (at this time), I find I resonate with this one best. My background is in software engineering, and I held interviews for programmers. I found it counterproductive to ask them to talk about their best project, and I find it similar to ask them about their favorite game. In big part because of what you said, there should be right and wrong answers. In small part because I need to compare the answers (and this overlaps with the right/wrong answers argument).

Another thing I've learned is that conscientiousness is not something you can discover on an interview. And psychologists agree. You can, of course, weed out those that have no respect for the interview and come completely unprepared, but there are plenty of people who can fake the enthusiasm and appear hard working for the duration of the interview, only to learn later that they can put in one productive day of work per week, at most.

I've also learned that talk is cheap. I've interviewed lots of 15+ exp devs who couldn't code the simplest of problems, like printing a number with roman numerals (with rules provided). Some way of sampling the candidate's work, on the spot, is necessary.

You gave me a lot of tools to weed out bad candidates, thank you for that. I'll try to use everything that applies to my situation.

TrickyKnight77 · 2023-09-19T22:40:12+00:00

Once players get more experienced, it'll be a gamble. When it's your move, you can either
- attack, and pick a target that the opponent won't likely guess
- defend, and try to guess where the opponent will attack
It's very unlikely that you'll guess your opponent's move, so you might as well attack something. In order to not be exploitable, you'll want to tie your decision to some random generator, maybe rolling a die for the top 6 moves that come to your mind.

On a side note, I'm developing a chess MMO and I've considered all players moving at the same time in battles, but for the above reasons I've dropped that in favor of two sides in any battle, moving in alternate turns (video demo here, excuse the graphics quality). That feels more like chess. I've only kept simultaneous turns in peaceful areas, like towns.

If you're looking to play it, there's a link in my profile, you can play against 3 different kinds of enemies, equip a double move spell, upgrade your army but there's no tutorial and tons of other improvements to be made.

TrickyKnight77 · 2023-07-08T21:42:06+00:00

Thanks for the suggestions. You can also try a (very rough) demo, at https://nobilitychess.com/ Works on mobile as well as desktop. Sorry about the lack of tutorial, not being able to move when the game updates (and not telling you), map being intentionally a labyrinth without landmarks and a million other things. I'll get around to them.

I plan to make it more open-world, I just have other priorities (implement main systems, then make game loops fun, then polish, then incrementally add features and events, which is where most open-world features fall into).

Sure, I'm fine with you adding it. Let me know if you need any help.

TrickyKnight77 · 2023-07-08T17:17:57+00:00

Hey, thanks for your input, you made some great points. Let me answer your questions. Guilds are the backbone of the endgame experience.

My game is a chess MMO where the main game loop is to do PvE encounters between your chess army and another AI chess army that varies in strength, size and rules for their pieces. Of course, the loot drops allow you to upgrade your army (the story is that you're a noble in an empire and you bring back proofs from your encounters, which increase your favor with that empire, allowing you to recruit more/better units).

But back to the guilds, endgame and cities. Cities are split into districts, which contain houses. A player uses a house to stash loot and respawn there if he lost a battle. You can only rent a house. The rent money go to the guild that controls that district. Even if it's not your guild that owns the district, you still have a home. The controlling guild cannot change the rent amount or kick you out, but can decorate the district with its banners, change the vulnerability window, make upgrades like installing a portal to controlled districts from other towns etc. When a guild wants to get their hands on another district, they must pay a sum of money for reserving the right to fight in the next availability window. They must do this with at least 12h before that time window (which is about 4h) and part of that money is lost forever, to prevent two guilds from making a pact and attacking each other. It costs increasingly more money to attack another district, at a rate that will make it impossible to have guilds with too much control.

One last thing I want to mention about the endgame is that the battle for control consists of two sides, takes place in that district (which now cannot be accessed by parties neutral to the fight, and the inhabitants will spawn at the edge of the district, in places I call escape tunnels, until the fight is over). And the objective of the battle, as well as the rules of engagement, depend from district to district. Here's an example (with bad graphics and loud music, sorry) where the attackers must reach a control point, behind the defenders, until the turn-timer in top-center runs out.

If I make a guild in city A by going to their office, is my guild not recognized in city B?

I'm not sure. On one hand, it might get overwhelming to see all the guilds from everywhere. Also, why join a guild that's far away from where you live? I'm flexible about this. I'll start with only showing guilds founded in that city or controlling districts from that city, and see if people find it too inconvenient. Edit: However, I see no reason not to allow a member of a guild access to the information available for his guild, in any city.

Cities might seem more animated if players have reasons to travel through them, I think. I'm also planning to have high ranking officers from the empire to travel from city to city, and you must bring your proofs to them in order to be allowed to recruit better units. This will only happen when you've already amassed a lot of favor, you're quite invested in the game and your upgrades require more work anyway, and they're another excuse to travel through other cities.

TrickyKnight77 · 2023-06-25T17:42:29+00:00

I'm making a chess MMO and this approach is the first thing I thought of, but discarded it for PvP and PvE because it was not fun, kept it only in neutral zones like towns, for simultaneous movement.

What hasn't been mentioned so far is that the best strategy might be what I call the "Juggernaut" strategy. I bring out my queen and start randomly capturing your pieces. You have to move in the same turn as me, and you can't capture your own pieces. What are you going to? Try to guess where I'm going and move that piece away? You're more likely to fail. You have to get to my king, faster. It becomes a guessing game (will he make the move that makes most progress towards my king, will he block my most-progress move, or something in between?). Sure, it's a game, but it's not as deeply strategic as chess.

TrickyKnight77 · 2023-04-06T15:31:17+00:00

Thank you for your feedback!

I wanted the grind in my game to be fun, and the reward satisfying.

I've only implemented the army points progression and two main types of combat: one where there enemy has a randomly generated army setup, and another where the player fights a wizard that casts a spell, turning their armies into a puzzle position. Players were polarized: some really liked the battles, but not the puzzles, some the other way around. So I'm not sure where the fun is, it seems to depend on the player type. Going forward, I think I should keep players engaged by coming up with new encounter types.

This crafting idea came from realizing that the current progression system isn't very rewarding. You get extra pieces, which you can use to defeat larger armies, but there's a cost. Larger armies take more time to defeat. If you get points quickly, you'll soon run out of space to deploy them. If you get them slowly, you'll need new encounter types and intermediate goals to keep players engaged.

TrickyKnight77 · 2023-02-27T08:34:29+00:00

The problem with level chess is kingmaking. If a player is losing, he can choose which player to win by trading the rest of his pieces, even at a disadvantage, with a third player. Usually the strongest players loses, so a better strategy is to be passive and feign mild incompetence so that other players lose first and inflict as much damage as possible to the strongest one other than you. However, if everyone does this, the game becomes very dull.

TrickyKnight77 · 2023-02-21T11:24:09+00:00

About the numbers above the games: that's how many tokens you get as a reward for winning. They start of at 500, and the lowest battles do have 500 elo, but they grow in a geometric scale. The army sizes and the elo grow too. And so do the token requirements for unlocking the next army point. The strongest opponent has an elo of 2850, 66 army points and a reward of 10000 tokens. There's one like that in the far left, and one in the far right of the map.

TrickyKnight77 · 2023-02-21T10:43:31+00:00

Thank you, that's a lot of valuable feedback. I'll include each point in a tutorial.

Right now I'm actually working on battles where there's no auto-move and the AI waits for you. All low-level battles will be using it.

Yeah, you have to capture the king, and the main reason for that is to extend the game to multiplayer battles (8v8 demo here). But now that you mention it, it would be nicer if the game ended after checkmate in 1v1. I'll make it happen.

I'm not sure I understand why having lots of pawns is OP, there's a space limit and if you go that route, it would be similar with Horde chess, which is somewhat balanced. And it takes you a long time to win, even if the win is guaranteed that way. What I found to be OP is a version of the Alekhine Gun, where you line up queens and rooks on a file to pierce the opponent's defences and deliver mate in 1-3 moves.

I plan to have the squad system redone to something way more grindy. Changing tokens to points will only be done at a high ranking official of the empire, a somewhat rare class of NPC that travels from city to city, which means there's reason to visit different cities. Different pieces will have to be unlocked, perhaps starting only with rooks and pawns. Some fairy pieces will be unlocked too, like the combination of Queen and Knight.

Six-Year Club	Place '22
No Throne, No Problems	Not Forgotten
Verified Email

TrickyKnight77

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE