play Chess Sphere for Linux

1ghost2horses

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Hi, I'm the one-man development team of this game.
This game has only been tested on a Ubuntu machine.
If you would like to test this game on other distros and post the results here, send me a message and I will email you the zip file.

Watch the trailer:

Download it for Steam:

Or at itchio:

Also available for VR:

If you're curious to try the game but don't want to pay the 3 dollars, you can play the web browser version entirely free here:
 
Last edited:


Moved to the Gaming sub-forum.

Be aware that OP will be making some edits to the original post. It's all good...
 
Whaaaat!?! That looks...awesome!

Indeed! I've wanted to hit the 'approve' button all afternoon. However, the OP needs some editing done to it, which the original poster should soon be doing.

It does look interesting! If my searching has been accurate, it's even a free game - meaning free as in beer. I didn't check to see if it's free as in libre, however.

Edit: Free in the browser.
 
I added the thing about the distros. Is there anything else I should add?

You should disclose that you're affiliated with it, and how you're affiliated with it. Thanks!
 
Got it, thank you.

Thanks for making the edits. It's appreciated and I really didn't want to have to nuke the thread. I figured we'd get some interest here, as we have some gamers.

By the way, I usually convince game developers to give away a few keys to our guests on a first-come, first-serve basis. But, I see you've offered to ship the .zip file and that it's free to play in the browser. (I'm decidedly *not* a gamer, I depend on our members to keep me informed.)

I see that it has also been available for a while. It looked like (from my brief research) that the game has been out, in one form or another, since 2021?

Out of curiosity, have you had some success with the game? Is it popular? Does it have an active community of followers?
 
Thanks for making the edits. It's appreciated and I really didn't want to have to nuke the thread. I figured we'd get some interest here, as we have some gamers.

By the way, I usually convince game developers to give away a few keys to our guests on a first-come, first-serve basis. But, I see you've offered to ship the .zip file and that it's free to play in the browser. (I'm decidedly *not* a gamer, I depend on our members to keep me informed.)

I see that it has also been available for a while. It looked like (from my brief research) that the game has been out, in one form or another, since 2021?

Out of curiosity, have you had some success with the game? Is it popular? Does it have an active community of followers?
I released the game prematurely a couple years ago only on Steam. It didn't have an AI for a one player mode, and I simply didn't have time to make one, so I just crossed my fingers that it would be popular enough that there would always be people playing. It was my first game and I learned the hard way how difficult it is to promote, and games don't last long in Steam's "new games" listings. So I imagine hundreds of people were logging into the game to find no one to play and then leaving immediately. But it got mostly good ratings so at least some people managed to find matches or they invited friends to play. The game was free back then too.

Originally I wanted to just have a dedicated website for the game, I didn't want it to exist anywhere else outside of it's website, and when I figured out how to do that I disabled the game from Steam and focused entirely on promoting my website. Then after experimenting with that for about 2 years I'm kinda giving up on that idea and just releasing it on every platform I can get on. Mainly because I bought a Steam Deck and fell in love with it and realized no one is gonna wanna play browser games on that.

Meanwhile, during all that, I spent an insane amount of time creating an AI, so people can at least play against the computer if there's no one online. I lost count but I think I have put at least 4000 hours into this game, it has driven me crazy. I'm literally working on it at this very moment. So I'm hoping, now that it has AI to play against, that it will start snow balling with players.

There isn't a community, for many reasons I was trying steer away from social media, when it was only going to exist in the website I wanted it to be completely free of facebook and all that. Even if I wanted to, it's just so time consuming to manage all that, i still gotta work a day job to pay rent. But maybe soon I will re-evaluate how I go about that.
 
Then after experimenting with that for about 2 years I'm kinda giving up on that idea and just releasing it on every platform I can get on.

You're doing the right thing, finding places where you can promote the game. In the future, you might want to just post a thread asking if you can promote your Linux game in a single promotional thread, explain your affiliation, and maybe offer to give out a few free licenses to the forum members.

I have a website that I've grown from a tiny thing to a site that gets tens of thousands of visitors. (It's https://linux-tips.us if you're curious.) You can also try approaching various Linux blogs/educational sites, asking if you can (again, be perfectly honest) write a promotional article and have them post it.

Again, in those instances, you could probably offer a few free keys to those who want to try it.

There are a ton of ways to promote your site. I'm completely new to SEO (and certainly at this level) and mostly got the viewers I get due to smashing out a bunch of articles - one every other day without fail for going on two years.

If you're creative, you can promote the heck out of it. Feel free to start an off-topic thread asking about how folks would promote your game. You never know - and it won't hurt to ask.

I lost count but I think I have put at least 4000 hours into this game, it has driven me crazy.

I can relate. I put a whole lot of hours into helping the Linux community, including my site. I monitor that bad boy all the time and make continued improvements. It's a labor of love 'cause I barely get ad revenue and have to pay for the hosting and the CDN bandwidth.

There isn't a community, for many reasons I was trying steer away from social media, when it was only going to exist in the website I wanted it to be completely free of facebook and all that.

You can always do your own community. Install a forum, add a blog to remark on new updates and game changes, and just keep at it - hoping it develops a community around the game. Maybe have some sort of tournaments where the winner(s) get their name posted on a "Who's Who" page. It doesn't even need to be cash prizes or the likes.

Then, be patient AND keep up the work.

You can also promote the site via social media, like Reddit. It's a Linux game, so make a post on Slashdot. It's a Linux game, make a post on Hacker News. Better yet, get one of your users to do it for you. (I don't have time or motive to promote your game for you. Someone else might. You just need some fans.)

I don't really want to derail your thread, but SEO is important.

If you use obscure keywords - like "Linux chess game" and pay for ads with AdSense, you might get some quality traffic that doesn't cost a whole lot. (Yeah, that's paying for promotion. You can do a lot for free.

I don't want to derail this thread, but you have options. You have all sorts of options to promote your site.

Wait a week and approach another Linux forum asking if you can promote your game there. Just disclose it, write it up showing how you're affiliated, and ask in a thread ahead of time. I really want to allow this thread through the spam queue, but I really couldn't do so until you did those things. Otherwise, it'd have been considered spam and I figured you had the best of intentions.
 
You're doing the right thing, finding places where you can promote the game. In the future, you might want to just post a thread asking if you can promote your Linux game in a single promotional thread, explain your affiliation, and maybe offer to give out a few free licenses to the forum members.

I have a website that I've grown from a tiny thing to a site that gets tens of thousands of visitors. (It's https://linux-tips.us if you're curious.) You can also try approaching various Linux blogs/educational sites, asking if you can (again, be perfectly honest) write a promotional article and have them post it.

Again, in those instances, you could probably offer a few free keys to those who want to try it.

There are a ton of ways to promote your site. I'm completely new to SEO (and certainly at this level) and mostly got the viewers I get due to smashing out a bunch of articles - one every other day without fail for going on two years.

If you're creative, you can promote the heck out of it. Feel free to start an off-topic thread asking about how folks would promote your game. You never know - and it won't hurt to ask.



I can relate. I put a whole lot of hours into helping the Linux community, including my site. I monitor that bad boy all the time and make continued improvements. It's a labor of love 'cause I barely get ad revenue and have to pay for the hosting and the CDN bandwidth.



You can always do your own community. Install a forum, add a blog to remark on new updates and game changes, and just keep at it - hoping it develops a community around the game. Maybe have some sort of tournaments where the winner(s) get their name posted on a "Who's Who" page. It doesn't even need to be cash prizes or the likes.

Then, be patient AND keep up the work.

You can also promote the site via social media, like Reddit. It's a Linux game, so make a post on Slashdot. It's a Linux game, make a post on Hacker News. Better yet, get one of your users to do it for you. (I don't have time or motive to promote your game for you. Someone else might. You just need some fans.)

I don't really want to derail your thread, but SEO is important.

If you use obscure keywords - like "Linux chess game" and pay for ads with AdSense, you might get some quality traffic that doesn't cost a whole lot. (Yeah, that's paying for promotion. You can do a lot for free.

I don't want to derail this thread, but you have options. You have all sorts of options to promote your site.

Wait a week and approach another Linux forum asking if you can promote your game there. Just disclose it, write it up showing how you're affiliated, and ask in a thread ahead of time. I really want to allow this thread through the spam queue, but I really couldn't do so until you did those things. Otherwise, it'd have been considered spam and I figured you had the best of intentions.
That's a very cool site. I like that terminal fortune. Are you using any sort of website builder like wix?

I can go on and on about all the ridiculous things I've done to promote my stuff, putting up funny fliers and stickers all over my city, handing out business cards, writing ads on craigslist, spamming on google maps, 3d printing things and doing treasure hunts on instagram, etc. I even got a 2nd phone line and made an app that continuously blasts text message with my link. It's exhausting.

Thanks for the tips, I will definitely try those out.
 
Are you using any sort of website builder like wix?

WordPress is the software behind it. It's heavily modified on the back end, and less so on the front end. There are a ton of features that all combine to make the site. So far, I've been able to keep up the publication schedule of an article every other day.

Thanks for the tips, I will definitely try those out.

There aren't that many people making native Linux games, so it seems like promotion wouldn't be too hard. I'm sure you'll find something and maybe even generate a user or two from here.

It's long past this old man's bedtime.
 
Meanwhile, during all that, I spent an insane amount of time creating an AI, so people can at least play against the computer if there's no one online.
What did you end up doing for AI? Space search with a board state evaluation (like piece value or something)? Do you have records of games played by users through the website? If so, have you thought about using those as a data set for training an ML algorithm?

I'm not a big gamer, but I like chess. This looks like a really cool game, but I personally wouldn't play if my only option was a two-player mode. I would want to figure out what works and what doesn't on my own before going up against someone else.
 


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