🎄New kid on the block

We have ourselves a new world chess champion. A new year has arrived. Master of Chess is in its final year of active development. Exciting stuff!

Did I mention that I've already added a DB editor in the game? It can be accessed on the beta branch! (and you can try mid-game adjournment save as well!)

What's the plan?

There's two big parts of MoC I'm working on adding next:

• 🧑‍🏫 Coaches

• 📘Openings integration

It will probably take me month or two more to deliver these. This will be a big content update and propel the price of the game to $19.99.

After that I plan to spend couple more months optimizing, adding QOL features and small improvements all around. This means that I should be done with active development of the game in Q3!

Seems surreal that this game I started as a small project on the side would become this huge game that I work on for 3 years. Time well spent!

Coaches

Inside Personal screen a new button is added: 🧑‍🏫Coaches. There's about 5 coaches offered on that screen. The first and automatically assigned one is Uncle Rob.

The others are there for hire and are only available when certain requirements are met:

• You have enough money to pay them at least for a month

• You have enough Elo to satisfy the level they require from their pupils

Every coach has different training regiment. Trainings can happen weekly, bi-weekly or monthly.

Every coach has minimum Elo requirement from his pupil, but likewise, every coach provides limited Skill Points to the pupil if player's Elo rating is greater than the range the Coach is capable of teaching.

Lets take Uncle Rob as an example. He teaches beginners and has no requirement for minimum Elo rating. But, if you happen to bring your Elo above 1800, every training session provides you with limited skill points, regardless of how well you solved his puzzles.

This pushes the player to start paying for a better coach, and finally provides some real meaning to acquiring money in the game.

Training variety

As far as training goes, having only tactics doesn't offer much variety.

I also wanted to add studies as training methods of higher-end coaches. A rook and a king vs king? A queen and king vs bishop and a king? Two bishops and a king vs a king? You get the idea. There's many endgame studies that could be generated and some of them could be really difficult. One could imagine I could also figure out the optimal number of moves the study could be solved in and deduct Skill points for each move you go over it. Slightly cruel, but what's cruel if not chess?

Another more simpler and faster training method is: you get a random position that's +3 or -5 and you have to figure out who is better. It could also have more granular approach where you have to give numerical value and closer you are to the score the more Skill points you get.

Coaches and openings

Many people rightfully criticize the Openings system in the game. I'm still working on proper design for it. Coaches should ideally factor into this too. Simplest approach would be to link amount of Book points your player gets with the quality of the coach. Because more depth in opening knowledge is needed as your player improves, there would be exponential growth in book points, not linear as it is now.

Of course it would need some rethinking as the design of Openings crystallizes but I think it's a valid approach. The whole Openings will be less about tedious creation of graphs and more numerically driven.

Conclusion

It's been an exciting year. The best year of my life. It's time to give it my all to try and have a better one. Cheers!