News

---

Relaunch - 14.02.2024

Well, its alive again.

---

Redux - 28.01.2024

I enjoyed having this little project go live, have a little attention and then to watch its slow but unavoidable death. In the end, I couldn't justify running the server and terminited the project.

Then, from time to time I thought about putting it back up and megachess.io was taken by some other person, and they did nothing with it. A couple weeks ago I noticed that it was up for sale at the same reasonable price I got it from, and I can afford to host it, so I'm putting it back up. I don't expect much to happen. But, it shouldnt incur the costs it did before if I let it idle away in a dark corner of the web. So, if you come across this, or return as one of the original players. I hope you have fun.

I shall be using this site and others as a bit of a test bed for other things, technical behind the scenes type stuff, like learning more about networking and hosting. Also, I think I'll avoid advertising for the time being. It sure would be wonderful to make a passive income but, honestly, I can't stomach being part of the advertising/suck-the-soul-out-of-literally-every-single-thing ecosystem.

Maybe I'll put the Koffee thing back up, but if I want sponsors I suppose that targeting the free online game crowd was probably a bit of a misstep. I'll have to settle for the statistics and occasional 16 hour game session.

Regards, Me.

---

Promotions and Abilities - 21.08.2020

I wanted to add another layer of depth to the game and allow players to have slightly different experiences on different play throughs. I don't think I've magically added endless mountains of depth to the game but, since the average game played (is actually around 8 minutes, but I think that includes all the people who don't really give it a go) is at least an hour I figured that it might be brilliant to give people a little bit more to explore. So, ranks and XP have arrived to the game.

So now when you take pieces the piece that did the taking gets a little bit of XP, and pretty soon the piece will be upgraded. There are three levels to get to.

Bronze, Silver, and Gold.

Maybe one day I'll add diamond or something for even more abilities and things to get. We'll see how this plays out first. I have plans to perhaps give each piece a unique ability at gold level - perhaps castles could support walls between them if you had two gold ones? Or maybe four gold queens in a square could generate XP to any piece placed between them? Maybe quads of gold bishops could serve as portals - who knows.
It's difficult to decide exactly what will break the game and what will actually improve it. I think the recent additions will be an improvement.

Really, this update marks a bit of a departure from the fantasy of success I had. An IO game is supposed to be so many things that megachess is not, but I've come to terms with that. I think the game is more difficult now compared to the last update - but if people are sticking around for a challenging game then perhaps that is best. Maybe the bounce rate will go up, but if the folks that stay are having more fun, then I suppose its worth it.

I'll never cover costs with ad revenue - to date I think I have covered a little over 1% of the server costs. But, if the game remains this small I think - provide my finances don't get too disrupted with Covid, I should be able to pay to keep the game alive so long as someone is playing it. Frankly, it gets a bit cheaper when fewer people play, but its not nearly so much fun.

So, the new version is up and alive now. Probably full of bugs. But, hey I think its polished enough to call it version 1.0.0

Once again, thanks very much for taking a look at my little project and playing it and joining the discord and all that good stuff.

---

Ghosts and Rewards - 21.08.2020

In the next couple of days I'll be pushing the new updates to the site. Right now its accessable through the alternate gameserver if you want to take a look. It might be up, it might be down. If you're reading this a few weeks from now it'll either be down or I'll be workign on something new there.

The pic above is of a player dominating the board, essentially winning the game. Which is great. It was a lot of fun to watch - and the concept of farming the bots isn't something that occured to me. As always, I am eternally grateful that someone played the game I made to this extent. But, this level of domination is the result of my poor game design - its a mutiplayer and its not supposed to be possible in a perpetual world to be able to do this.

I had hoped that there would be a large number of human players and this sort of thing would be naturally impossible. but, alas, its not as popular as I'd hoped. (Not yet) So my only choice is to impose a substantial nerf on the players.

But all is not lost. I have other offerings.

Pictured above is the new look of the game. I've switched up the black and white bases and coloured pieces for black and white pieces and coloured bases. Hopefully this makes it a lot clearer that it is a team game - the classic chess teams.

Pictured above also are the new bonus pieces. They will be collectable pieces. Try to take one and you will be awarded that piece - and you get awarded the rank score as if you'd taken them too.

This choice has been made to further address the wild imbalance of the game. Since before it was only possible to gain pieces via taking players kings any situation where one playve was dominant enough lead to the situation where it was hopless to even try. These noew bonus pieces will help palyers in the early game by giving them access to powerful new pieces. In combination with the kingdom mechanic (by jove, thats what I should call it) I hope this will lead to, quite simply, people having more fun.

Lastly, for your viewing pleasure. The stats page has been launched. So you can peruse that to take a look at the competition or see if you've made the leaderboard.

Thanks again.

If you're stuck, or looking for more info or are perhaps interested in the development of the game there is a community on the discord. We'd love to meet you.

---

The great nerfening - 10.08.2020

I feel it has to be done.

I've spent a lot of time playing other IO games of late and I've tried to list and distil the core gameplay mechanics that make them so much fun to play. quite frankly, I feel megachess.io has fallen short on a few key points...

• Mindless - these games are usually easy on the mind - obviously, this is never going to be a hallmark of megachess.
• Progression - usually you can level up somehow - I think megachess has this.
• Accessibility - yeah, press play and you're good to go.
• Risk/Reward - IO games usually provide a series of high risk / high reward situations - I'm not sure where megachess stands on this.
• Initiative - always lies with the weaker players in generally successful IO games. - I don't think this will ever be a part of megachess.io.
  • Perhaps it sort of it... nut not really. The only advantage a smaller player has is that they have fewer pieces to take care of. But this is not the same as agar, for example, smaller players being faster and being able to dictate the outcome of most encounters by either running or fighting.
• Balance - Generally, in IO games you kill players that are the same level as you are. Not higher, because they are too strong. Not lower because they are too fast. But this is chess... and I don't think this can be achieved without breaking the game.

There is, however, a way to address one glaring balance issue, and that is to nerf the players slightly, and to give new starting players an early game advantage.

The plan is to introduce a mechanic that gives the Kings a sphere of influence over their armies. Basically this simulates the hard fact that the larger and empire the harder it is to control. Pieces beyond a threshold will start to fade away - as if they've grown tired of their distant ruler and will defect.

At the same time I'm in the process of adding ghost piece bonuses to the game. You'll be able to take them and will be awarded an extra piece, and the score of having taken a piece of that rank. There is a slim - note, SLIM - chance I'll put in the occasional new king - though this might break the server and also undermine the point of the nerf.

The end result of this should be that large players no longer become completely impossible to defeat, and early game players have a way to grow without having to engage with overwhelming odds.

---

We are a community of 10 - 09.08.2020

Well, thats nice.

Truly, I didn't really expect much of a response to this game after launching. So I am very grateful to all those who have paid attention, given feedback, or even just played the game.

In response I have decided to continue development beyond what I had originally planned. The original plan was to make megachess.io as a toy, which I believe would have been very very popular in 2006 or something, as a vehicle to learn all about servers and html5 games. Then continue with developments on a variety of projects till I got stinking rich off of something.

But, here you are, and here I am. People are playing it so I think it's right to try and improve it. Okay, other projects will be slowed down but they are non-entities, which nobody cares about. If I take my time and do it right, I'll probably be able to transfer megachess.io to a new server system and make It has a few more features. But that's all for another day.

Thanks for playing.

---

New features in the works - 06.08.2020

As the game evolves it's become quite clear that I need to let the vision of what I want the game to be evolve with it. That's what good developers do, and I'd like to be a good game dev one day.

So, since the game is taking a bit of a base building turn I've decided to develop some tools to help manage all those pieces. I've been playing along with other people and on my own and there seems to be a trend of players making larger and larger defensive positions. I'd originally expected this to be quite rare behaviour but the higher numbers of players that the game was designed around having haven't appeared so people have been having fun in other ways.

And, who am I to say that you have to have fun my way?

So, there are two main things in the works right now.

• Pre-turn moves

  • Will allow players to line up moves when they are wondering around the board surveying their kingdoms.
  • Hopefully it makes it less frustrating to miss out on opportunities by being distracted.
  • It'll be more fun.

• Planned moves

  • Will allow players to move lots of pieces over a long period of time without much effort.
  • Hopefully it'll make base building and defense a lot more satisfying and a lot less frustrating. I never wanted this came to be a fastest clicker wins game so this tool feels like its fits the spirit of the game.
  • I think it will lead to certain new tactics emerging, which means, naturally...
  • It'll be more fun.

---

Change Log