Heya! Master of Chess is on sale in the Sport-acular event. Exciting stuff!
It's always cool when the game gets into a Steam festival as it increases the amount of traffic the Steam page gets. And hey, it's 20% off!
In other news: I'm couple weeks off from releasing the new version, 0.8.x.
Latest development
I worked a lot on the openings. I'm quite happy with the direction it is going in. The most often requested features are already there: separated black and white repertoires, priority lines that are played through in the Key Moments simulation and more believable NPC opening play.
Opening proficiency
Modelling realistic opening knowledge isn't straightforward. One of the problems I hope I'll solve better in the future.
For now, I've added proficiency levels for different lines. I've called it Line Knowledge as proficiency sounds too smart-ass. You use your book points to improve the line knowledge and this allows you to expand your opening line deeper and deeper. The deeper you go the more book points it requires.
It's easier to understand with a picture. So here it goes (stil WIP):
The given player has deep knowledge of queen and king pawn openings. So if line knowledge is 10, the player can build his opening graph as much as he wants as long as he isn't going more than 10 moves deep. You choose your primary lines in the graph and they are selected in Key Moment simulation!
Missing pieces
Next step in my Openings Redo attempt is to get the NPCs to have some sort of opening preferences. I've done a lot of work around this topic but I would always fall short. I'm falling short for now as well but I at least can see light at the end of the tunnel (if I don't get to it soon I'll just cut it short 😊)
Lastly, I'm implementing a window in which you can see more details about the opponent. It was often requested and makes total sense. Sometimes you want to see your historical score against a specific opponent. This is very close to being done.
Ideally, this window would also contain information about opening preferences of the NPC, but I might cut that out as well. Obviously a lot of things depend on me handling the previous step successfully 😀
The end
I plan to release the game out of Early Access in the summer. It's so close now!
I've been working on this project for almost 3 years now. It's incredible. I've learned so much and I hope to apply it when I make a second instalment of this chess career simulation game in couple of years. But for now it's all about making Master of Chess the best it could be.
If you have ideas and suggestions, join my discord to tell me about it:
https://discord.gg/HYV8Zz8V2Q
Cheers!