How Chess Force Armada got built, and the games that happened alongside it. Newest first.
Macro / Meso / Sub Terra got picked up again alongside the Armada work — a results screen, a proper credits pass, and version numbering so a build can be told apart from the one before it.
The biggest stretch of the whole project. In two months:
Then an Android build proven on real hardware, and Piece Designer polish — paint tools and a gizmo toolbar.
Network play settled into something we trust. And a new AI opponent joined the roster: Nova.
New piece models, board cursor, hover/selection effects.
The split-out libraries became properly published packages — the engine now stands on its own, independent of the game.
Faster shaders, better materials, reworked selection highlighting.
Another GameDev.tv jam, another game — this one in Godot. A professor spills his coffee on the prototype, the quantum realm crashes into the human scale, and you have to walk a team of lab technicians out through it. Particles only turn lethal when somebody's looking at them.
Music by Barry Coffey. Playable in the browser on itch.io, there's a trailer on YouTube, and we're still adding to it.
Asteroids, nebula skybox, explosions, trail effects, music — the sci-fi look starts here.
A full month spent on nothing but network reliability — every board, on every machine, staying in step.
Bred AI opponents against each other with a genetic algorithm.
Full test coverage on piece movement rules.
Split networking, economy, and logging out into their own libraries.
Steam lobbies and room joining came together. Save and load shipped too, compressed, so a battle in progress could be picked up again later.
Started the Godot rewrite. Two AI opponents added — Lilith is still in the game.
Unity changed its pricing terms, so we went looking. Godot won — open source, and ours on our own terms.
Integrated Steamworks — lobbies, avatars, invites, bans.
Added a turn timer. Upgraded to Unity's HDRP for lighting.
Procedural maps, an economy system, 4-player multiplayer, fog of war — all in one month.
Multiplayer worked for the first time. Same day, renamed to Chess Force Armada.
Started multiplayer support, backed by a separate WebSocket server and client library.
Taught the game to read and write standard chess notation, so a position could be written down, saved and set up again exactly.
Prototyped a "team swap" mechanic to see how it played. Sharp lesson, learned in a day, and the rules came out cleaner for it.
Built in two days flat for the GameDev.tv Game Jam 2022, in Unity. Still playable today, either on our Games page or over on itch.io, in the browser or as a Windows build.