Two things today. A new game, and a pile of Chess Kingdom improvements that came almost entirely from you.
Casino Legends is out now
My new game just launched!
Casino Legends is a premium, offline casino game where you build one bankroll across poker, blackjack, roulette, baccarat and slots. You read your rivals, work your way through connected venues, and climb from nobody to Casino Legend.
No real money gambling. No microtransactions. No online requirement. Just a full single player game for $4.99.
And here's the good part: [b]if you own Chess Kingdom, you get a discount on it through the bundles.[/b] Steam knocks off what you already own, so you only pay for the rest.
And no, Chess Kingdom support isn't stopping
I know how this normally goes. Dev a new game, first game quietly gets abandoned. Not happening here.
Here's the proof: everything that's landed since the last patch notes on August 3.
Four new country sets
Denmark, Norway, Finland and Switzerland join the National Pride line. Built the same way as Sweden: actual landmarks carved into the pieces, not a flag slapped onto a generic pawn.
Denmark: Rundetaarn, Roskilde, Kronborg, a Viking helm, a dragon prow, a shield
Norway: a stave church, Nidaros, a fortress, Lindesnes, the fjord horse, a rune stone
Finland: the Sibelius monument, Helsinki Cathedral, Olavinlinna, birch and cupola, a reindeer, a birch log
Switzerland: the Matterhorn, the Zytglogge, Chillon, a Guard helm, an ibex, a cowbell
They're in the Collection, under the COUNTRIES tab.
Fixes
Your chess set could secretly turn back into Staunton
Reported here, and a good catch. If your profile had a country picked that has a flag but no piece art, the game went looking for pieces that don't exist. Every missing image quietly fell back to Staunton, so the Collection kept telling you Marble was equipped while the board showed you something completely different.
Now the game checks your saved country against the actual list, repairs it if it's wrong, and falls back to the chess set you really equipped. The Equipped badge finally shows what the game is actually using.
You couldn't hear the move sound
Turns out the move sound was playing this whole time. It was just about 22 dB quieter than the capture sound, so you'd hear every capture loud and clear and basically nothing when a piece simply moved.
It's properly audible now, still softer than a capture so you can tell the two apart. I also added a check to the build, so a too quiet move sound can't sneak into a release again.
"where are the gifs??? i click save gif then i cant find the gif"
Yeah, fair. Save image, Save GIF and Export PGN have always saved into a hidden Windows folder ([i]%APPDATA%\\chess-kingdom\\exports[/i]), and the button just said "Saved!" and left you to figure out the rest.
Now every export tells you exactly which folder it went to, with an [b]Open folder[/b] button that takes you straight there. Save GIF also used to just give up silently if the game was too short to animate. Now it tells you why. And all those button labels were stuck in English, so they're translated in all 31 languages now.
The AI could freeze the whole game
The AI does its thinking on a separate background thread. If that thread ever died, the game fell back to thinking on the same thread that draws the screen, permanently. Which means every AI move after that froze the window solid for as long as it was thinking. Up to 45 seconds on Master and Legend. Not great.
It now just rebuilds the thread and carries on, and the move it was working on restarts on the fresh one instead of you sitting there waiting for a timeout.
While I was in there I made a rule official: [b]the AI never plays weaker because of your platform or your hardware.[/b] Pondering follows your setting and nothing else, and power saving drops visual effects, never engine strength.
Faster start-up, Steam Deck especially
Found a good one here. There's a one time settings migration that runs at startup. It was one time in the sense that it only ever changed anything once, but it still read and parsed your entire save file on every single launch, before anything appeared on screen, just to work out that it had nothing to do. That's now 352 ms down to 28 ms if you're a returning player.
The startup logging was also making startup slower, which is a fun kind of irony. Every checkpoint was its own separate write to disk.
End result: first screen went from around 420 ms to about 320. The Deck feels this more than a desktop does, which lines up with the "start-up takes way longer on Deck" reports.
Touchscreen play (Deck and touch laptops)
Dragging a piece with your finger now lifts a bigger version of it [i]above[/i] your fingertip instead of hiding it under your own thumb, and outlines the square you're about to drop on. And if you drop just next to a square when there's only one legal move you could have meant, it plays that move instead of dumping the piece back where it came from. Mouse play is untouched.
Also fixed pieces sitting slightly off center under the cursor while you drag them.
That's it for now. Every single fix up there started as somebody posting about it, so please keep it coming. Tell me what's broken, what's confusing, and what you want to see next. I read all of it.